Paragon Reinterpretations
by MB18932
Summary: AU. Humanity makes First Contact with the galaxy peacfully, and the resulting technological and cultural exchanges successfully obliterate next to all Renegade beliefs the species holds. This is the world of Mass Effect where the human race is one made up virtually entirely of idealists. Inspired by College Fool's Renegade Reinterpretations.
1. Chapter 1

I do not own Mass Effect. The series is the property of Bioware and EA.

This narrative is being made in reaction to the expertly written Renegade Reinterpretations by College Fool, wherein humanity's First Contact experience obliterates any semblance of Paragon thought in the Mass Effect universe, and alters it to one that is entirely Renegade, a world where Cerberus is held as the greatest role models in human history, clone soldiers make up the majority of the population of the Systems Alliance, and ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide against alien species are casually debated from the top of the government down to the general populace. I loved the work, and was inspired to write this, its polar opposite; where all Renegade sentiment has been removed, and humanity reaches into the stars filled with optimism and hope. This is…

**Paragon Reinterpretations**

Tell me if you've heard this tale before. A young species develops and grows, tentatively reaching into the empty space past its own atmosphere. Wonder and excitement follow the discovery as proof of a long dead race. The species, emboldened and enabled by the discovery and technology within, expands even further across the stars and the galaxy itself. It settles colonies, it explores, and for a generation it is a golden age of discovery and peace.

And then it makes First Contact, and this golden age expands twenty fold.

If you identified this new species as Humanity, you are correct. And happily, your every expectation shall be exceeded: for first impressions are everything, and few species could have given a better first impression than the asari, a people whose dreadnoughts, weapons of unparalleled destruction and horror, looked like works of art. Shanxi was not the first battle against an extra terrestrial assault by the Turian Hierarchy seeking to enforce its laws or by slave-lusting Batarians seeking to expand their power and influence, but the ground on which humans met those who would lift them into a new world of wonder, and in time would become their greatest friend and ally. And General Williams was not dragged in chains to court martial by a victorious Alliance, but was praised and rewarded for possessing the clearness of mind to bring his terrified men to heel and not launching an unwarranted assault upon the newcomers.

The technological catch ups were, by all accounts, miraculous, for a species with barely 15 years into the studying of the Mass Effect suddenly encountered and adapted the machines and methods of another who had hundreds, if not thousands, of years to refine it. There was barely a thought of violent action against the other species the humans soon met. The long time dream of a multi-race community that had possessed the species in recent times had been proven long since true, and the humans, now fully united under its System Alliance, joined it without hesitation or reserve, eager to share in this incredible new existence it found itself in.

It was the single brightest time in human history. This is the catalyst that changed and defined the Human race as it emerged on the galactic stage. This is, ultimately, a happy story, a story of glory. It is, at heart, a Paragon's story, of one race rising up to prove its worth to its new home.

This is First Contact, and, for once, it was thoroughly pleasant, and did not result in war.

**Authors Notes:**

Like the aforementioned Renegade version, this story is not a fanfiction, it is a narrative. It is a reimagining of the Mass Effect universe from a Paragon/ Renegade to one that is entirely Paragon in concept. The subdivisions of Paragons can now be freely explored, like subdivisions of Renegades were previously.

The first parts of this work will deal with the changed back story leading up to Mass Effect 1. Following this, all of these changes will be expressed through the entire series.

Unfortunately, unlike College Fool, I have none of this written out ahead of time, so my updates, with all of my remaining stories, will likely suffer as a result. So, if you guys don't think this is very good, tell me, and I will focus on my initial stories.


	2. The Enlightenment

**2165-2170: Systems Alliance-The Enlightenment**

When the Systems Alliance first made contact with the Asari Republics, it held colonies on ten garden worlds, of which Eden Prime and Terra Nova were the most economically viable and held the largest populations, and was making preparations to colonize three more. In addition, dozens of rock worlds, asteroids, and gas giants had vast infrastructure, mining seemingly unending veins of iridium, platinum, palladium, helium-3, element zero, and all other manor of raw materials. These supplies were then shipped back to the massive industrial yards and ship yards in the Sol system, in geostationary orbit over Earth, Mars, and the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

From these yards, the tools that fueled humanity's solar empire poured; prefabricated colonial buildings, merchant vessels for trade between the planets, farming equipment for the vast grain fields of Eden Prime, mining equipment for Terra Nova, which held the largest platinum deposits yet found by the people, and the weapons, armor, tanks, and warships of the small but growing Systems Alliance military, for while humanity wanted nothing more than peace with any fellow residents of the galaxy, they were unsure if any of those residents shared that sentiment. After a handful of cases of the abuse of workers and shameful indifference to the safety of those who purchased the initial products, powerful regulations were enacted by the Alliance, ensuring that workers were paid well, the products of excellent quality, and the entrepreneurs still made a tidy profit. Any human that took even the broadest look at this economic boom would declare it the most inspiring thing ever accomplished.

A single glance at the galaxy humanity was introduced to quickly showed them how wrong they were.

While the terrans experienced many things in the initial aftermath of First Contact, a universal feeling of humbleness was one of the most obvious and widespread. Its economy was puny compared to the juggernought that was the asari's, its military a laughing stock set against the Turian Hierarchy, and its scientists and engineers were useless compared to the genius of the salarians. The Systems Alliance realized that, far from being a major power, they were in fact children playing in a sandbox, and immediately began a desperate race to close the gap.

Humanity did not have to start from scratch in its modernization attempts, however; they had help. A year after Matriarch Benezia met with the Shanxi Colonial Governor, the Alliance was granted an embassy on the Citadel, and teachers, scientists, and engineers rushed past the 314 relay, bringing the gifts of vast technological and scientific advancement.

It took four years of breakneck study before humans developed technology that would not reduce alien peoples to tears of laughter, and even then, it took fifty years before it was on par with the rest of the galaxy, though achieving this feat in that amount of time astounded everyone, including themselves.

At the same time that the Alliance was beginning efforts to close the technological gap, great efforts were made may various lesser human organizations to learn and decipher the cultures of the new alien neighbors, particularly the asari; they were the most visually and culturally similar to humans, and of all Council species the asari were the most well known, as they were the ones to make first contact. Within two to three years, humans adopted numerous cultural ideas from the Republics, and a few from the Salarian Union and Turian Hierarchy. Others were altered slightly, and blended with existing human culture. Because of this, by the turn of the decade, the Systems Alliance had become the most culturally diverse government in the known galaxy.

In an effort to integrate itself into Council society, humanity's first ambassador to the Citadel, Anita Goyle, started her career by negotiating several trade treaties with the various council nations. This proved easier than previously expected; although the Alliance economy was, by comparison, small, it was able to fit in several niches in the galactic market. The need for platinum for hydrogen power cells is a never ending, ever expanding demand, and Terra Nova's exports of the metal soared. With the uncovering of a new species came immense curiosity from other races, including a desire for the newcomer's culinary pallet. As a result, several backwater farming colonies received a much needed economic boost as they exported their foodstuffs out to other levo-amino acid species. This left Eden Prime with a natural monopoly on feeding the Alliance itself. Finally, several massive deposits of iridium were discovered in the asteroid belt in the Sol system. Because of the metal's critical need in the production of weapons systems, from small arms to tanks to capital ships, a significant portion of the ores mined were exported to the Turian Hierarchy, allowing the Citidel peace-keeping nation to expand its fleet, and ensuring hefty profits for human merchants.

The greatest human economic success stories of these early years were in the medical and colonial manufacturing industries. Medigel, a universal healing agent that worked far in excess of any Citadel counterpart, was immediately exported in such amounts that the manufacturers immediately underwent massive expansions just to keep up with demand. Tests were carried out on the DNA of all council species, and varieties of medigel specific to different races were on the open market within a few years. Although the method of producing the substance was later revealed to other nations, humans had an uncontested lockdown on the sale of the "miracle" substance for well over a decade. Sales of prefabricated buildings and equipment spiked as Alliance industry enabled and fueled numerous alien colonial efforts in the Attican Traverse that the home governments were unwilling to back due to the risk of pirate and slaver attacks. While some of these new colonies did indeed suffer this fate, most were able establish themselves and achieve self-sufficiency, and insuring stable sales for human companies.

With its economic situation secured, the Alliance turned its full attention to modernization, and learning as much of the galaxy as it could.

Update:

I forget to write this in before, but I would like to bring your attention to , another writer on the site. Rilly has also been writing a version of Paragon Reinterpretations, and from what I have seen so far, it is extremely well written. So go check it out; you won't regret it.


	3. The Newcomers

**2165-2170: Citadel Council-The Newcomers**

First Contact for the peoples of the Citadel Council races were actually more common than most people of its respective nations believed; a new sentient species was found at least once a century. Most, however, were extremely primitive societies, and were left alone, with protection from any who wished to exploit them. Only on very rare occasions, a race was discovered that had entered an industrial age, and cautious attempts were made to communicate with them. The last time this had occurred was with the species that called itself Yahg, and their massacring of the Council's initial diplomats had left a foul taste in the mouths of all who remembered the event.

For them to encounter a race that had developed interstellar capabilities, and had already staked its claim on a small slice of the galaxy, so soon after this blundered meeting, was panic striking.

Benezia, Matriarch of the asari, had been traveling to a diplomatic meeting with the Batarian Hegemony, in an effort to coordinate an effective resistance against the gangs of slavers that had been attacking outlying colonies of multiple species. Everyone on the ships knew that the mission was pointless; few people would say it out loud for fear of backlash from the extremely egocentric Hegemony, but it was common knowledge to all that the Batarian government itself was the driving force behind these raids. Not intending to waste time on the matter, the diplomat ship and its escorts decided to use a secondary mass relay to a nearby relay cluster that had recently been discovered. All of the relays at the intersection, baring the two larger primary ones, had been activated, but regular routes had not been established as of yet; the delegation expected no traffic of any significance.

What they found instead was a flotilla of System's Alliance ships, which had already activated one primary relay, and were beginning to do the same with the second.

Upon spotting the asari ships, the humans immediately ceased their activities, and fled back beyond the newly active primary relay to their home territory. Benezia and her followers were now faced with a choice that could have disastrous consequences; should they alert the Turian fleets that the activation of prime relay, a grave offense in Citadel Space, had occurred, or should they follow the new race, that clearly did not know the dangers of such a practice, and make contact themselves.

The Matriarch settled on the second option. And the rest is history.

Of all the races of the Council, the asari were easily the most ecstatic at the meeting with humanity. In addition to the obvious physical similarities, the Alliance and the Republics shared numerous cultural ideals; both were democratic societies with heavy emphasis on the rights of individuals, more inclined to seek diplomatic solutions than armed conflict, and eagerly embrace the cultures and ideas of others. In the opening days of humanity's assimilation into Citadel Space, many believed that asari and humans were, in fact, descended from the same species, and had been artificially separated to different planets by the Protheans, or another older space faring race. This rumor would continue for decades, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The Turian Hierarchy was less thrilled with the Alliance, mainly due to their habit of opening deactivated primary Mass Relays, a practice that had been banned in Council Space for two millennia after the Rachni Wars had nearly destroyed the civilization. As such, the peacekeeping military was appalled that the Alliance would do such a thing. Fortunately, upon learning of the ancient war, the Alliance was appalled by its own lack of caution, issued a public apology for their actions, and promised that it would cease opening primary relays it encountered. Satisfied, the Hierarchy began its own study of the Alliance, particularly the peoples' past military exploits. Turian generals were particularly awed by humanity's amphibious invasions; Turians are unable to swim for any extended period of time, and so have always steered clear of ocean warfare. As a result, the Normandy invasion of World War 2 quickly reached legendary status amongst Hierarchy populous, and one admiral declared the United States of America's island-hopping strategy in the Pacific Ocean "more of a story out of mythology than a military campaign".

The Salarian Union had some of most pressing interests in the Alliance joining Citidel Space; of all the major powers, the Union shared the longest physical border with human space, and were concerned that this would leave them venerable to attack. The concern was not of an attack by humans, as the Alliance fleet, only numbering 3 fighter carriers, 20 cruisers, 40 destroyers, and 60 frigates, was vastly outnumbered by the Salarian fleet and that was without taking the technological differences into account, but rather that an concentrated attack from a united Terminus would smash through the weak nation, and move on to Salarian space. Thus, the Union signed a treaty with the Alliance that guarantied military assistance in case of attack and assistance with technological advancement, in exchange for several recently discovered garden worlds near human space. The deal was accepted with near universal approval from humanity's Parliament.

The associate species reaction was mixed. While they were almost all cautiously optimistic about the arrangement, some were less so than others. All recognized that with a new species came more competition to attain a seat for their people on the Council.

The hanar, at first, were apathetic to the new comers; their government, the Illuminated Primacy, had long since been an isolationist state, with only a few trade relations with other species. That changed, however, when humanity dropped a proverbial bomb; deep in the Prothean Archives on Mars, explorers found a stone slab, carved in the likeness of the base's original owners; humans were the first race to find a confirmed likeness of the Protheans, who the hanar worshiped as their gods, calling them Enkindlers. As a result, the Primacy immediately set up diplomatic relations with the Alliance far in excess of any other species, and problems immediately arose as millions of hanar attempted to enter the Sol system to see the faces of the divine beings themselves.

The Elcor, after initial curiosity in the new members of the Citadel, largely lost interest in the Alliance; human and elcor space were on opposite ends of the galaxy controlled by Council members, and both were too weak to bridge the colossal gap easily. The Elcor Courts of Dekuuna and the Systems Alliance maintain diplomatic relations, but have very little to talk about; there is neither a conflict nor concurrence of interests.

The Vol Protectorate, while technically part of the Turian Hierarchy, nevertheless have a large amount of independence in economic matters. Having evolved as a mercantile people, they had, over time acquired a keenly honed business sense, and this came in full swing upon establishing contact with the newfound humans. Almost immediately, Volus merchants began exchanging technology for human-unique items, such as medigel, though this technology was outdated by decades. Although many Council species decried this practice as blatant profiteering, the human customers were ecstatic; though uselessly old by Volus standards, the tech provided was incomprehensibly advanced to humanity, and reverse engineering these items speed up the Alliance's tech advances by decades.

The Batarian Hegemony is considered, by far, the most antagonistic in the regards to humanity's arrival. The species had long believed itself intellectually superior, due to them having four eyes while most other species possessed only two, and generally viewed the Alliance as yet another race of inferiors that would be subjugated once the Hegemony inevitably took its rightful place as the masters of the Milkey Way. When the Alliance's existence was first announced to the Council by Matriarch Benezia, the Hegemony's first act was to covertly commission a slave raid on the human world of Shanxi, in an attempt to subjugate the humans and ensure a new, exotic element in its slave trade. Fortunately, the slaver armada was intercepted by the turian 31st Fleet, on its way to the 314 relay with the specific intent of preventing such an attack, and the turians surrounded the unprepared criminals and annihilated them to a man. With their initial plans foiled, the Hegemony grudgingly sent diplomats to join with the assembly of species at the Citadel to greet the Alliance ambassadors.

In order to ensure smooth negotiations with the Alliance, the slaver raid, and the existence of the Batarian slave system, were not mentioned.


	4. The Long Burn: Military

**2170-2210: Systems Alliance-The Long Burn: Military**

It wasn't until the turn of the decade that the Alliance felt secure enough in its position that it turned any significant attention to the state of the galaxy as a whole. The reasons were great; most predominately, its military was small, and technologically backward, leaving it vulnerable to even basic pirate raids. As a result, increasing and up gunning the alliance navy became Parliament's first priority.

In spite of its obvious lacking in numeric and tech areas, the Alliance Navy was strong in that it was far more diverse than any other species' space forces. The destroyer, essentially a larger, more powerful frigate armed with a small mass accelerator in addition to its younger cousin's torpedo bays, was more suited to frontline combat and more effective at screening the capital ships against their fellows in the enemy fleet. This freed the smaller frigates to launch flanking attacks on the enemy fleet without having to worry about protecting the capital ships. While Alliance frigates are named for great battles of human history, destroyers are named for military campaigns, and large scale actions.

Another ship type, first designed before first contact and with two in construction when Benezia landed on Shanxi, was the Battlecruiser. Midway between cruiser and dreadnought size, these vessels were designed for two purposes; hard, fast assaults, and capital ship class commerce raiding. The vessels were armed with two spinal mounted mass accelerator cannons, anit-fighter laser batteries, and most notably, large lateral torpedo batteries for "knife-fight" combat. The basic premise of ships was "destroy all that is smaller, outrun all that is bigger"; the vessels could outfight any merchant vessels and their small escorts, and could flee from heavier enemy dreadnoughts, even in conditions that forbade faster than light travel. Named for the rivers of Earth, the Nile-class battle cruisers were the first of their kind in the galaxy.

The greatest and unquestionable most powerful element of the human navy is the fighter carrier. In the ocean going navies of Earth's nations, there had long been the, very much vindicated, belief that aircraft carriers were superior to battleships. For all the power that dreadnought guns provided, they were incredibly vulnerable to the aerial assaults of dive bombers and torpedo planes. This mentality had carried over to the space bound navy; unlike most races, whose first kilometer long ship had the biggest gun the people could build strapped to it, the Alliance preferred to stuff theirs with interceptors and light bomber craft. Bearing the names of famous human leaders and intellectuals, the Albert Einstein class carrier was the one true thing that gave the Milky Way pause as to the wisdom of attacking the Systems Alliance in its early days on the galactic stage.

Despite humanity's initial unfavorable attitude towards the dreadnought, the human admirals immediately recognized that the Alliance needed its own battleships. With the advent of kinetic barriers, the supremacy of ship board strike craft over heavy ships was no longer absolute. The torpedoes launched by fighters would take time to wear down the vessels powerful shields, and that was without taking anti-missile laser batteries into account. Still, it was nearly three decades before Parliament could amass the capital necessary to produce such a ship of quality. The first human dreadnought, the Everest, was completed and brought into service just at the turn of the century. In an effort to outreach to the Hierarchy, the Alliance allowed an inspection from a top ranking Turian admiral on the ship. He declared that, while by no means the greatest ship of its type, it was competently designed, built, and manned, and he would not even consider facing the Everest without at least one dreadnought of his own. Ecstatic by the review, the Alliance immediately commissioned two more dreadnoughts, the Elbrus and the Fiji, and began the policy of naming human dreadnoughts after Earth's mountains.

As for the ground forces of the Alliance, its marines, army, and civilian militia forces remained largely unchanged aside from increased technical quality of arms, armor, and equipment. In major ground engagements, the Alliance, like the Hierarchy, attacks with combined arms; tanks, infantry, artillery, and aircraft mutually supporting each other. However, this is where the similarities end. Whereas the turians focus on a slow, methodical advance along a broad front, the Alliance favors daring, fast battles of encirclement. An evolution of the german Wermacht's blitzkrieg, human battle doctrine calls for tanks and armored personnel carriers to mass at weak points in the enemy lines, drive forward, break through, and run in an arc around the enemy forces, cutting supply and communication lines. The breaches were than secured by following infantry units.

The Hierarchy quickly learned the effectiveness of such tactics. During the Interracial War Games of 2197, two mock armies of the two races faced each other on a wide isthmus, which the turians believed cancelled out any threat of being outflanked. Using their usual tactics, the turians attacked the human line along its length, and immediately found that the Alliance center was completely devoid of tank support. Believing his opponent had made a fatal mistake, the turian general shifted units from the flanks to the center, believing he could break the humans. It wasn't until human tank divisions smashed through the junctions where the turian center connected to the flanks did he realize that he had walked into a trap. The turian army found itself caught in three massive pockets. Although the center, and largest group, was able to break out to the rear, the turian flanks were caught fast, and "annihilated". With a third of his force out of action, the turian general was unable to stem the Alliance tide, and the humans won the mock battle. This caused great consternation with the Turian Hierarchy; while the technological gap had still not been entirely closed, it appeared that human maneuvering was perfectly capable of redressing the balance. In addition, the behavior of the soldiers in the flank pockets was shocking; although drilled to retreat in good order, with neither attack nor retreat an option, and with their backs to the water, many younger soldiers had actually panicked, something almost unheard of in turian military personnel.

In naval warfare, the Alliance again prefers lighting strikes with overwhelming tactical force. However, with first contact now a reality, most admirals see that such attacks would end in disaster unless the enemy forces were weakened first, and doctrine has now shifted to guerilla raiding on supply lines for extended periods, followed by a knockout punch. On the defense, the Alliance lives by Sun Tzu's maxim, "He who tries to defend everything defends nothing." Although at first glance Alliance colonies seem undefended, the human navy is concentrated at three relay junctions that can reach any human colony within hours. Even if the Alliance garrison is defeated and the colony occupied, overwhelming reinforcements are guaranteed to arrive quickly.

While the Alliance's military advances were great, humanity's greatest military success story was written not by the official military, but by a civilian industrialist. In 2168, Jack Harper, along with his fiancé Eva Core and friend Ben Hislop, declares that humanity is too weak to survive without aid in the galaxy, and calls for a "Cerberus" to be formed to guard the Charon relay against any who wished humanity harm. Using his own businesses and connections throughout the Alliance economy, Harper began construction of his own fleet and army based on Pluto and the moons of Neptune. Although most dismissed the man's project as rubbish that was doomed to failure, a sizable minority supported his actions, and the new para-military force had a sizable number of volunteers. By 2210, Cerberus boasted a war fleet half again as large as the average Alliance fleet, an army and marine force of 2,500,000, most of which were expert commandos, a dedicated science team, and an information network that is surpassed only by the Shadow Broker and the Salarian Special Tasks Group. Although Parliament offered numerous times to make Cerberus an official part of the Alliance military, at first Jack and Eva Harper have always politely declined, saying that Cerberus can best serve the Alliance, and mankind as a whole, by remaining apart from it. However, in the face of increased suspicion about the organization, eventually the couple gave in and merged with the Alliance navy, although they remained in personal command of the force as an act of good faith.

Cerberus is the founder of the now famous N7 special forces, and is at the forefront of human biotic research. Their main focus is currently on how to increase biotic talent and frequency in human populations without resorting to the brute force method of spreading element zero dust over vast populated areas; Jack Harper in particular is vehemently against the practice, as it killed and maimed far too many children to ever justify the increased biotic potential.

oo-00-oo

_I! Oh! Let's go! _

_Shoot 'em in the back now!_

_What they want, I don't know; we're all revved up and ready to go! _

And yes, in this universe, Cerberus is not a shadowy black-ops terrorist organization, but the elite, admired guardians of the Sol system. Let's see the Reapers try to take Earth now!


	5. The Long Burn: Civilian

**2170-2210: Systems Alliance-The Long Burn: Civilian**

The effects of the first half-century after first contact on the Alliances civilian population cannot be underestimated. The technological advances, as well as massive influx of alien cultures, ensured that the face of the Alliance was barely recognizable.

Improved methods of manufacturing, farming, and mining were embraced with a vengeance, vastly improving the efficiency of all. While this caused a drop in the number of jobs initially, exports to the other powers of Council Space ensured vastly more jobs were created than were destroyed. With the unemployment rate at near zero, virtually the entire Alliance population had large amounts of disposable income. As such, the standard of living rose across the board, especially in small farming and resource mining colonies.

As evidenced by Medi-gel, humans had a vast understanding of medical matters; at the time of first contact, the average human lifespan was 120 years, with each individual being economically viable to some degree until the last ten years of life. With the inclusion of Citadel technology and techniques, the average lifespan jumped to 180 years. The few remaining diseases native to Earth that still afflicted humanity, apart from those deeply engrained in the genetic code such as Vrolick's Syndrome, were finally eradicated. In addition, human doctors and scientists cured numerous aliments of their new companion races, even ones said to be "uncurable". Most noteworthy was the successful stalling, than curing, of Keprel's Syndrome in the Drell, a reptile-like race that had nearly gone extinct after their desert homeworld had run out of resources. The few members of the species that survived did so by being evacuated by the Hanar to their own homeworld, Kahje. This had caused the unforeseen consequence of the creation of Keprel's system, as the drell, unable to cope with Kahje's extremely humid atmosphere, had bacteria fester in their lungs that quickly became immune to even the most advanced antibiotics. The first strategy was to have the afflicted drell inhale millions of specially designed microscopic nanobots, which hunted down and destroyed the bacteria in the afflicted tissue, without causing respiratory problems. In all causes, the nanobots, supported by the patient's natural immune system, brought the disease to a halt. A few decades later, the Sirta Foundation revealed new cybernetic implants that would finally bring an end to the disease. Attached the patient's bones, the implants secrete an artificial enzyme of the drell's version of hemoglobin, which the disease eventually affected. Immune to the bacteria's influence, the enzymes continued to carry oxygen throughout the patient's body, rendering the disease impotent.

After the first operation to place the cybernetics, and the eventual success, the hanar ambassador to the Citadel told Anita Goyle his soul name. The two remained great friends until the end of their days.

What was by far the most notable, pivotal, and most far reaching event of civilian life, however, was humanity's population explosion. With the aforementioned medical advancements and life expectancy spike, the Alliance's death rate fell to near zero. In addition, in-utero surgical procedures ensured that all newborn infants were in near perfect health, and infant mortality rates went the same direction. In addition, many older couples, whose children had already grown up, suddenly found themselves with a new lease on life, and many decided to become parents a second time. These were the first of the "double timers", the generation where the majority of the members gave birth to entire new set of children after their first offspring had reached maturity. At the same time, these first children started having offspring of their own, causing the birthrate to double at a time were death and infant mortality rates were almost non-existent. What truly caused the massive population increase, though, was the colonial mindset of the people; specifically, in the past, most families settling in newly acquired territories on the edge of civilization had many children, as more bodies meant that more work could be accomplished. As humanity surged into the stars, this mindset returned with a vengeance and the average number of children per family jumped from 2-4 to 6-8.

By 2210, the human population of the Systems Alliance had nearly doubled from 13 billion to 24 billion. And that was without taking alien immigrants into account.


	6. The Long Burn: Alien Immigrants

**2170-2210: Systems Alliance-Alien Immigrants**

One of the most curious aspects of the Alliance is that it not only tolerates aliens immigrating into its space, but actually encourages it, and makes an active attempt to woo the surrounding species to immigrate to Alliance Space. It began simply as an attempt to gain knowledge regarding the galaxy, but as the decades passed, and the Alliance lost its need for such things, the immigrants kept coming. The reasons were many; some came to make business connections, others to be with their family members that elected to stay in the Alliance. The vast majority, however, came for the same reason the masses of Europe crossed the Atlantic Ocean to America; they sought a better life, for themselves, their families, and their descendants.

By 2190, Earth had ousted Thessia for the record of most aliens taking permanent residence on another species home planet, with a total of 25 million members of other races calling it home. This number, counting those on other Alliance planets, while significantly smaller than the human population, is still large, and Parliament was beginning to get requests to give the aliens actual citizen status to them. In a galactic first, in 2199, Parliament passed a bill that would allow alien immigrants to become full Alliance citizens. 6 million individuals applied in the first day alone, and most permanent residents had applied by the end of the year.

The plan encountered two major unforeseen problems almost immediately. The first was largely at the Alliance's cost. Many Turian Separatists, who for decades had been launching periodic attempts to secede from the Hierarchy, began applying for the now galaxy famous System Alliance "green-chips", and after obtaining them, they quickly took up the cause of their rebellions, whether through attempting to gain political support, or going so far as to use Alliance space for regrouping and planning out attacks. Needless to say, this caused great political backlash with the Turian Hierarchy, and Parliament was forced to quickly draft new legislature to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control. The resulting law was long and complex, but boiled down to a simple premise: All Turian Separatists that apply for Alliance citizenship must cease all support for uprisings in the Hierarchy, whether direct or indirect; failure to do so would result in the revoking of citizenship, and immediate deportation to Hierarchy officials. This smoothed over the potential diplomatic incident, although some turians still rankle over the fact that many traitors are able to escape justice by hiding in humanity's doe-eyed utopia.

The second major problem did not have nearly as much of an initial impact on the Systems Alliance, but in time, it would prove far more serious.

The Batarian Hegemony, by far the most tyrannical government of all Council Species, had long kept a chokehold on all its citizens; through propaganda, it controlled what they thought, through the military, it controlled how they behaved, and through the cast system, it controlled what they did. Even after making contact with the Citadel, very little changed, as most on the ancient station believed that it was not worth provoking the Hegemony's ire; it was fiercely egotistical, and would sooner fight the whole galaxy than even consider baking down from anything. Thus, most believed trying to change the lot of the average batarian was more trouble than it was worth, and left well enough alone.

However, once word reached Kar'shan of the Alliance handing out citizenship to aliens almost like candy, the people of the Hegemony began emigrating by the millions; in their arrogance, Hegemony officials had not extended their extremely strict emigration limits to the Systems Alliance, believing that none of their people would wish to go the recently discovered backwater. Although their iron fist immediately slammed down the familiar limitations, it did not stem the tide at all, and a massive backup began to form. This quickly led to an unprecedented level of impatience in Batarians seeking to immigrate; for the first time in their lives, they had smelled freedom, and now that they had they were willing to go to desperate lengths to acquire it. Many began taking ships to independent colonies in the Attican Traverse, or even the Terminus Systems, and making their way to Alliance space from there. Even when Kar'shan ordered a full military blockade at all major mass relays leading out of the Hegemony to _stop their own people from leaving_, the exodus still refused to cease; many attempted to run the blockade, sometimes in large groups to ensure at least some got through, or attempted to reach mass relays outside Batarian space using traditional FTL.

The Hegemony's call for the Alliance to detain these escapees and deport them back fell on death ears; human immigration laws are, by far, the most relaxed of any race. All that is required to become a permanent resident is personal identification, a criminal record, an economic résumé for adults, and an understanding of basic human laws; Hegemony policy required the first three to be kept on ones person at all times, and the last was an extranet search away. After that, any who lived and worked in the Alliance for five consecutive years and took the Oath of Allegiance to their adopted nation were eligible for full citizen, and without exception, the batarian immigrants leapt at the chance. Because of this laissez-faire doctrine, the immigrants were breaking no laws, and the Alliance had no reason to deport them. Eventually, however, Alliance policy changed from "not providing assistance" to "actively preventing detainment" rather quickly. When one particularly ambitious Hegemony admiral brought a sizable fleet up to the 314 relay in order to capture a large fleet of immigrants, it was met by the human 1st and 2nd fleets, accompanied by the Everest and a quarter of the Alliance's fighter carriers. The ranking human admiral present gave a polite, but firm, request that the Hegemony withdraw its fleet from human space, which they reluctantly did.

These were just some of many grievances that were beginning to pile up between the Batarian Hegemony, and the Human Systems Alliance.


	7. The Long Burn: Expansion

**2170-2210: Systems Alliance: The Long Burn- Expansion**

In the early days of human expansion, the Alliance opened every mass relay it could find, trying to claim as much space as possible. The reasons for this land grab were many; securing new garden worlds would relieve the growing overcrowding problem on Earth, resources to fuel the economy, and more than a little desire for bragging rights. When they eventually encountered sentient life, humanity wanted to be impressive, to show that was capable, and worthy, of surviving in the galaxy. After being informed of all the past horrors in Citadel History, especially the Rachni War, however, the Alliance dropped its expansionist mindset like a hot iron; they now realized that continued expansion at such a rate could doom not only humanity, but also numerous other species, to extinction.

For the foreseeable future, the Alliance would focus on developing existing colony worlds, and terraforming suitable planets, making them capable of sustaining life.

As a result, many of the colonization efforts that had been preparing to go to different planets were redirected to garden worlds the Alliance already held. Within months, numerous settlements sprang up on these worlds, and Eden Prime and Terra Nova had two new cities each with populations in the millions by 2175. Most smaller colonies had at least one city by the same time. With these bastions of civilization secured, settlers began to spread across the surfaces of the planets by the hundreds of millions as the decades passed. Special care was taken not to endanger the environments and biospheres of the colonies, however; a high value had been placed on all life by humanity, and they took special care to avoid affecting it. Plans were already being drawn up for the so called "green cities", metropolis centers that incorporated local flora and fauna into their design. Theoretically, after construction had ended, the cities' existence would have no impact on the environment at all.

Such techniques were still beyond human capabilities, however, even with the tech leap that was occurring simultaneously. For the time being, the Alliance would have to make do with extreme diligence watching to make sure Earth crops and animals did not escape into the wild, and did its best to find and mark any migration routes for terrestrial and marine life, so as to avoid interrupting them.

At the same time, Mars was being terraformed en masse. Several dozen massive ice comets were towed into the Sol System through the Charon relay, than dropped towards the planet. The heat of entering the thin Martian atmosphere melted the frozen meteors into water vapor, and soon thick banks of clouds formed over the red planet, covering most of the surface.

In 2182, Mars experienced its first thunderstorm.

The massive downpour continued unabated for 13 years. When it finally ended, the thinned clouds revealed that slightly over half of the Martian surface was covered in two vast oceans, with numerous seas and lakes scattered across the remaining supercontinent. With the cycle of precipitation now present and stable, efforts turned to thickening the atmosphere, providing protection from solar radiation, and keeping the new water from being blasted away by solar wind. In 2197, several large nuclear bombs were driven deep into the planet, all the way to its core. Once the drill holes were sealed, the explosives were detonated. The extreme pressure at the depths amplified the effects, and reheated the planets core. By 2209, molten iron began to rise up into the Martian mantle, cool, and fall back down to the core, jump starting the dynamo effect and began to give Mars a trace magnetic field that was augmented by hundreds of trillions of nanobots, finally giving the red planet some minute protection from Sol. Three years later, Olympus Mons, the massive extinct volcano on the planet, began to erupt again; the Alliance had foreseen this, and had set up monitoring stations on the mountain to ensure that the lava flowed evenly, and did not build up for an explosive eruption that would undo all the humans' work. At the same time, lichen was used to cover the every speck of dry land, and massive shiploads of cynobacterium were dumped into the oceans to raise the oxygen levels in the atmosphere, again with the assistance of nanobots, and shipments of nitrogen and oxygen harvested off planet.

In addition to Mars, the Alliance is also terraforming three post-garden worlds, planets that were once as lush as Earth, but had since declined to the point where all, or almost all, life had gone extinct. The efforts were not nearly as expensive as the Mars operation, however, as these worlds were already fit for human habitation in terms of atmosphere content and magnetic fields were concerned; all that was needed was reintroducing water and life to the planets. What was concerning, however, was the fact that two of the planets appeared to have been subject to extensive orbital bombardment in the distant past; impact craters surrounded by vast pools of liquid iron-tungsten-uranium that had since solidified were everywhere, and as they contained trace amounts of element zero, there was no way they could have been natural meteor impacts. Dating placed their age at 150,000 years ago, far before the Protheans were a space-faring race.

The mystery about these ancient battles would take almost a century before the answer was made known.

All of this was not to say that humans did not settle any new garden worlds during this time; negotiations with several galactic powers allowed human colonization efforts on several planets within their borders that they did not wish to colonize for various reasons. The largest and most influential of these worlds was Bekenstein; founded in 2191, it quickly became humanity's largest business world with the galaxy at large, with dozens of corporations, both human and alien, having bases on it. By 2210, it had a population of 2.2 billion, mostly aliens, and was Illium's greatest competitor, although this had the side effect of slightly marring relations with the asari.

By 2210, however, space in the Alliance was running short. Terra Nova and Eden Prime had populations of 3.6 and 3.4 billion people respectively, with almost all other garden world colonies possessing at least 1 billion. Mars and the other post-garden worlds were still at least a decade, or more, from being stable enough to support colonists. On Earth, in spite of massive emigration, the population has barely fallen; it currently houses 10 billion, of its first contact population of 12 billion. Knowing that it must expand soon, and now feeling secure enough to do so now with its upgraded military, the Alliance began laying out plans to establish colonies further into the Skyllian Verge. In that year, two colonies were founded, Elysium and Mindior, and terraforming centers began construction on Antibaar.

All would have been well, had the Hegemony's obsession with expanding its power not chosen that moment to rear its ugly head.

oo-00-oo

**Author's Note**

**Yes, I'm fairly certain that I took an ax to science with regards to the Alliance restarting convection in Mars's core and the terraforming timeframe, but hey, I've heard many people say that Bioware did the same with how biotics work, so what's couple more dubious experiments. **


	8. Precipice of War-Alliance: Military

**2211:Precipice of War-Systems Alliance: Military**

In a little under half a century after first contact, the army and navy of the Systems Alliance are barely recognizable. What was once a completely ineffective force is now a well trained, well equipped, well lead, and extensive military, albeit one without much combat experience. In spite of this, morale is high on all levels, as all Alliance soldiers now posses supreme confidence in their abilities and those of their comrades.

The navy, once smaller than even the hanar's, has tripled in size. Now possessing three dreadnoughts, with three more under construction, 12 carriers, 20 battlecruisers, 60 cruisers, 120 destroyers, and 180 frigates, and augmented by Cerberus's 2 carriers, 5 battlecruisers, 15 cruisers, 30 destroyers, and 45 frigates, no sane Terminus warlord would even consider attacking human space, as the policy of concentrated attacks from mass relay networks ensured that up to a third of the entire Alliance fleet could come crashing down on a minor pirate raid. In addition to conventional firepower, the human fleet has exceptional electronic warfare abilities; specially made, powerful VIs can hack into enemy ship computers, disabling weapons and shields, shutting down engines, turning off life support and venting atmosphere, and even turning electronically controlled anti-boarding weapons against the crew. In fact, in most attacks, the Alliance prefers to disable ships electronically, than return, board the ship, clear out any surviving crew, and take the ship as its own, although most pirate craft are so outdated that they are stripped for parts rather than converted for military use.

While the Alliance usually focuses on mobile defense, with very few fixed emplacements, there is one exception to that rule; the human controlled side of the 314 relay. While several other primary relays in Alliance space have been opened, due to their twins being in Citadel controlled space, the far end of the 314 pair is located in the almost lawless Skyllian Verge, and is considered the most vulnerable entrance to the Alliance. Because of this, no less than ten dreadnought sized gun emplacements have been built, there barrels trained on the relay. In addition to the kilometer long mass accelerator weapons, these floating fortresses also contain launch bays for VI controlled mines, and fighter and interceptor strike craft. In the event of war, making it past this crossfire would take a massive fleet, and doing so would guaranty massive casualties. Even if the line could be breached, the counterattack from the Alliance fleet would certainly break the survivors.

What many consider to the human navy's most potent weapon, however, lies in the smallest of capital ships; the frigate. Seeking to recapture the usefulness of the submarine, human scientists and engineers had long been attempting to make a system of disguising a space warship. By 2211, they had long since completed their work, and any new frigates built had these stealth systems, and all previously built vessels were retrofitted with them as well. Nicknamed "_Unterseeboots" _after the infamous German submarines of the first and second World Wars, human stealth frigates posses an unparalleled potential for supply line and commerce raiding.

As for Alliance ground forces, its marine army is surprisingly small; it numbers only 720,000,000, barely 3% of the total human population. Of these, almost all are volunteers, except for the penal battalions, made up of those who have committed horrible crimes, such as murder and rape. While the Alliance strongly discourages using these units as simple cannon fodder, they still suffer the highest casualty rates of any military branch.

While its army seems small at first glance, it is much stronger than its size indicates. With a small volunteer base, all those who enter the service are held to extremely high standards of competency. Only the best are accepted into its ranks, and they have been able to outfight almost all other militaries, and inflict severe damage on those they can't. Their "victory" over the Hierarchy in the Interracial War Games gave these men and women great respect from other major powers in the galaxy. Also, the Alliance policy of granting aliens citizenship gave recruiters a species-blind policy; race has no bearing in the Alliance military, only citizenship and the willingness to serve. Because of this, the Alliance has the benefit of numerous Citadel species specialists, mainly Asari, Salarians, and Batarians, who serve as biotic support, tech support, and heavy shock troops respectively. Finally, Parliament has set up draft laws in case of war declaration that can get 10% of the Systems Alliance population in uniform, trained, and in the field in a matter of months.

If such a case were to occur, the small initial army would form the core of a 2.4 billion strong juggernought. For this reason, the Systems Alliance is often referred to as the "sleeping giant" of Council Space.

As a people, humans have a very firm belief in "clear warfare"; that is, that a state of war should be declared before fighting takes place, attacks on non-combatants should be avoided if possible, prisoners of war are to be treated with respect, and essentially to behave in as chivalrous a way as possible. This has caused many to look down on the Alliance as ludicrously naive, especially the Salarian Union and the Turian Hierarchy. Both do not distinguish civilians from soldiers, and the former never declares war at all. The Alliance, however, firmly stands by this belief, saying that winning a war is simply a way to remove an obstacle to a goal; if winning the war becomes the goal in and of itself, than they will lose sight of what they are fighting for.


	9. Precipice of War-Hegemony: Military

**2211: Precipice of War-Batarian Hegemony: Military**

Prior to the discovery of the Systems Alliance, the Hegemony was, unquestionably, the most militarily powerful Associate Species of Citadel Space. Of its 40 billion inhabitants, a full 7%, 2.8 billion, were under arms, either actively or in reserve. Its navy could field 7 dreadnoughts, due to their watching the number of Turian dreadnoughts like a hawk, 200 cruisers and 465 frigates when fully mobilized. In terms of size, it held three times as many colonies as the Alliance, and its economy was significantly (though not overwhelmingly) larger. Large fixed emplacements were set up at every mass relay they controlled, making any fight on their own territory a bloody war of attrition. Finally, it could, unofficially, count on the support of countless pirate and slaver groups to harass their enemies.

On paper, any war between the two governments would almost certainly end in with a batarian victory. However, there were many weaknesses that many military minds noticed, and would unquestionably through the outcome of this hypothetical war in doubt.

The first was the Hegemony's refusal to design and build their own versions of humanity's "new" ships. While all other races of the Citadel had hurried to construct their own carriers, battlecruisers and destroyers, the batarian leaders, in their typical arrogance, refused to believe the ships of the human primitives could have any appreciable effect on space warfare. This was belief that would persist even in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. During a simulated battle between the two navies, the batarian technicians reported a victory to the Alliance, as superior numbers of fighter and interceptor craft had overwhelmed the Batarians, and with combined fire from the human capital ships, destroyed a Batarian dreadnought. Hegemony admirals overruled the simulation, and ordered it redone. When the results of this battle showed Alliance battlecruisers breaking the batarian line and stealth frigates destroying a third of the retreating force at the nearby mass relay, the technicians were executed for deliberately sabotaging the simulations, and no further investigations were made into the matter.

The second was fact that 18% of the Hegemony's population, 7.2 billion people, were slaves. Combined with the massive unrest of the unenslaved civilian population meant that the batarians needed to keep large amounts of ships and soldiers in order to make sure that rebellion did not break out. Because of this, war meant that the two forces would engage each other on equal numerical strength.

The third was the only one actually recognized by the batarian military; if they wished to invade human space, the only way in not controlled by another council member was the 314 relay pair. This meant that the Hegemony fleet would be bottlenecked right into the waiting jaws of the Alliances massive fixed guns, nicknamed the "big sticks" by their crews, and any human warships. This could very well spell the doom of the batarian efforts, as superior numbers, if they could be brought to bear, would be meaningless in such a situation.

The fourth was the tens of millions of batarians who had already immigrated to the System's Alliance. While most of these had been ordinary civilians, a few had been deserters from the Hegemony military, many of whom had joined the Alliance army or navy upon receiving citizenship. Thus, the human military has great knowledge of the Hegemony's usual tactics, and has had adequate time to develop counters to them. In addition, several batarians have been employed by Cerberus as spies and double agents.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that the Batarian Hegemony is not held in high regard by any other Citadel race. Their buying of slaves that are taken from colonies in the Traverse has caused great bitterness on the Citadel. Because of this, if the two nations went to war, the best the Hegemony could hope for is for the other Citadel members to not assist the Alliance. At worst, it could have half the known galaxy declare war on them at the same time, and form a coalition the Hegemony could never hope to defeat.

In spite of all this, however, the Hegemony military remains a powerful fighting force, with a far longer service record and more experience than the Systems Alliance. Its sailors and marines are supremely confident, and fanatical in their devotion to the Hegemony; they will likely never rest until the whole galaxy has been subjugated by them. They are not to be trifled with.


	10. Precipice of War-Relations

**2211: Precipice of War: Alliance-Hegemony Relations**

In the decades leading up to the Verge War, most people in the galaxy would describe relations between the human and batarian governments to be "the worst diplomatic relations of any two Council members". This is incorrect. Diplomatic relations between the Alliance and Hegemony are not poor.

There are none to begin with.

During the Enlightenment, the representatives of the batarian government rubbed every human that met them the wrong way. The impression given was not pleasant; they came across as arrogant, and openly looked down on the human newcomers. In addition, the caste system and the brutal tyranny of the nation caused much consternation among the human populace. Past experiences with such governments had taught the collective human conscience that they could not be trusted.

Then, in 2174, the Alliance found out about the slave trade within the Hegemony.

The public backlash was enormous, and immediate. Protests, and in some cases riots, formed on Earth and every colony, demanding something be done. Some even supported war with the regime, though logic prevailed in that argument; the Systems Alliance was nowhere near ready to fight a minor Terminus power, let alone a government that had been building up its power for three centuries.

However, this did not mean that nothing was done. Parliament immediately withdrew the representatives that had just been sent to Kar'shan, and forcibly removed the batarian embassy on Earth. Not stopping at severing diplomatic ties, Parliament also withdrew recognition of the Hegemony as a sovereign nation; so far as the System's Alliance is concerned, batarian space has no government, and is as lawless as the Terminus.

Nor was this backlash limited to the human government. Without exception, human businesses and corporations boycotted Hegemony worlds. While the rest of Citadel Space quickly received the benefits of medi-gel and human-built colonization equipment, the Hegemony was forced to buy such things second hand. Although some batarians gave great offers to the Alliance entrepreneurs to open in Hegemony space, few accepted; most refused to deal with a government that dealt in slavery on principle, and those that did usually went bankrupt as their human costumers deserted in disgust.

The batarian leaders were incensed; the other races had presented difficulty with them, but never had an entire people so blatantly spit in their face before. Immediately, the Hegemony demanded that the Council force the Alliance to acknowledge the Hegemony and open economic ties. The politicians on the station, however, did not interfere; they declared that it was the Alliance's decision with regards to their acknowledging the Hegemony's sovereignty or not, and they had no say in the matter.

They also added that the Alliance had done nothing to warrant war, and would not tolerate an attack on the fledgling nation. Disgusted, and with their hands bound, the batarian leaders had no choice but to accept the stinging blow to their pride.

As the decades passed, the Alliance continued its unofficial policy treating all Hegemony personnel as "persona non grata"; essentially, they were not allowed within Alliance borders, and all humans travelling the galaxy large made a point of ignoring them. Until the outbreak of war, the only humans that acknowledged the existence of Hegemony officials were the Alliance ambassadors to the Citadel, Anita Goyle and later Donnel Udina, and whenever they dealt with their batarian counterparts, they always began their dealings by tilting their heads to the right; according to batarian body language, such a gesture indicates that the one making it believes him/herself higher than the recipient, and is often used as an insult. This practice has driven the batarian ambassadors to the Citadel to extreme frustration.

Such was the hatred the Alliance gathered from the Hegemony that soon pirate and slaver raids on human colonies became less of an unofficial policy and more of a way to vent their hatred for the humans. However, because of Alliance naval doctrine, and the ever increasing size of its navy, these raids met with limited success in the initial attacks starting in 2182, and quickly dwindled to disastrously ineffective as the years passed.

There was one raid, however, than is forever burned in the minds and souls of all Alliance citizens, human and alien alike; The Amaterasu Massacre.

A small colony with only two major cities and less than 1 billion people, Amaterasu was, while not unsuccessful, not particularly lively either. Its biggest claim to fame was the planet General Williams retired to after his service to the military ended, and his family remained there for several generations. While it did receive a regular military patrol, it was farther from a relay nexus point than most human colonies, meaning that any military intervention would be slightly longer in arriving than other colonies.

In 2104, the slavers based on the planet Torfan decided to take advantage of this fact. Working for months, the largest such organization outside the Terminus systems worked out every detail of their plot. As soon as the path of the mass relay jumps was clear, the small armada they had gathered sped through the path, managing to avoid alerting the still incomplete fixed gun line, and made it all the way to Amaterasu without alerting anyone to their presence.

By the time Systems Alliance forces appeared in system, the damage had long since been done; the capital of the planet had already been ransacked, and tens of thousands had been taken by the slavers who, while they had left the planet, had not yet used the mass relay to escape. When the human warships moved away from the relay, the slavers made their move; they had hidden in dark space just within the system, running at minimum power requirements, and had jumped past the Alliance guard and escaped the system before the human sailors knew what had happened. As they reached Torfan, they slapped each other on the back, and congratulated themselves on the success of one of the most daring slaving operations in recorded history.

What they did not realize was that the electronic warfare VIs on the battlecruiser SSV Monongahela had, in the brief moment before their escape, hacked into their ships' data bases, revealing their base of operations, numbers, and defenses.

In the planet's capital, there was chaos. Tens of thousands had already been kidnapped, and many other were killed or wounded. Many women on the planet, particularly the handful of asari residents, had been raped, repeatedly. A great deal of the infrastructure had been destroyed, and would take years to rebuild. All of this paled, however, when Alliance scout teams opened the doors of the first of three hospitals…

Due to the massive baby boom that had been occurring in the human population, numerous hospitals had to be built with the single function of delivering newborns. Nicknamed "baby factories", these birthing centers brought many hundreds of infants into the galaxy every day. Vast rooms holding the newborn babies were often used as an image to showcase the future the Alliance had in the galaxy.

To the slavers, it was an opportunity to curb the population of what the batarians were increasingly considering a pest species.

At each of the three hospitals within the slaver occupied zone of the capital, the Alliance soldiers were met with a sight pulled straight from the depths of hell; virtually every single infant in these medical centers had been ritualistically impaled, their tiny bodies nailed to their small beds by pre-prepared spikes. A scant few still clung to life, and were saved with emergency surgery, but the vast majority had long since passed on. Many of the marines present, almost all of them veteran soldiers, fell into hysterical weeping at the sight. Others flew into an uncontrollable rage, and had to be restrained by their shell-shocked comrades.

The news of the attack, and the whole-scale slaughter of the younglings, spread like wild fire across human space. For almost a generation, those in the Alliance believed they had finally escaped such atrocities, and that they and their children were safe within their homes. However, fear and grief quickly turned to rage. The citizens demanded that those who had committed this atrocity be found, and brought to justice.

To the amazement of the galaxy, however, the Alliance did just that in a matter of days.

Livid that such a crime could have occurred under its watch, the various branches of Alliance military cooperated on an unprecedented level with the information the Monongahela had gathered, and within days, a third of the Alliance fleet, including the Everest and the Fiji, were headed toward Torfan.

After stealth frigates had arrived in system and jammed communications, N7 and Cerberus Special Forces infiltrated the main base on the moon, liberated the captured slaves, and shut themselves and their freed hostages into the main fallback position of the fortress. Then, the battle fleet arrived in system, and annihilated the unsuspecting, uncoordinated slaver fleet in orbit. Marine and tank forces than landed on the moon's surface, and surrounded the slaver base. Just when the batarian defenders had rallied, the ships in orbit unleashed as massive tech attack, cutting communications and disabling all heavy weapons emplacements. With this, the order to advance was given to the ground troops.

At this point, any semblance of organization in the attack dissolved. While the plan called for hard points in the slaver line to be taken first, followed by a general attack, every single Alliance soldier charged pell-mell into battle, in the manor of the old human wave tactics. Although casualties were high, in some areas up to 35% of the units involved, the soldiers pressed on, shouting "Remember Amaterasu" as their war cry. In the end, the swarms of vengeful marines spilled over the defenses, and slaughtered 85% of the slavers in brutal hand-to-hand combat; the vast majority of batarians killed at the Battle of Torfan fell from combat knives, monomolecular swords, omni-blades, and even rocks. The few survivors were gathered together, and had their eyes gouged out; batarians believed that the soul passed out of the body through the eyes, and removing them before that point would mean the soul would remain trapped in the corpse and decay along with the body. When some Hegemony officials protested the action, Parliament responded by making it an official policy; any batarian slaver captured by Alliance personnel was to be "eternally imprisoned", with the sentence being carried out on the spot.

To the Alliance, the Battle of Torfan was the righteous, and unquestionably justified, vengeance against those whose crimes were beyond description, let alone forgiveness.

To the rest of the galaxy, it was a shocking realization of how far the Alliance could go when provoked, and the power they wielded when focused on a goal with single-minded determination.

To the Hegemony, it was yet another blow to their ego, and action that made the later human settlement in the Skyllian Verge completely unacceptable. The leaders of the criminally insane government began to draw up plans for the invasion and subjugation of the Systems Alliance; more soldiers were drafted into the military, slaves were secretly fitted with explosives to be used as living bombs, and they even broke the Treaty of Farixan; four new dreadnoughts began construction in secret in the deepest part of batarian space.

At least, they thought it was done in secrete.

Little in the galaxy could hide its scent from Cerberus.

oo-00-oo

**Now for those of you who are questioning the brutal nature of the Alliance Torfan counterattack, please remember: Paragon does not mean "nice to absolutely everyone at all times". Take the Overlord DLC, for example; when you find out what the person in charge of the project did to his autistic brother in the name of science, the "Paragon" option is to pistol whip him and verbally assassinate him and every aspect of his character. **

**THAT was the PARAGON reaction to the treatment of ONE person. **

**Now imagine the reaction to the blatant, pre-meditated murder of a few thousand newborn babies. **

**Also, the reason for the large casualty count on Torfan in canon Mass Effect was because the Renegade Shepard fed his troops into the battle with no regard for their lives so long as they got the results he wanted. Here, those soldiers charged into the fight without any hesitation, even when their superiors were actively planning an attack that would end as few of their lives as possible. They weren't sacrificed in the name of the ego and success of one man or woman, they were enraged to the point where they no longer cared if they died so long as the slavers were defeated. **

**Now, some fun facts. **

**Ashley and Sarah Williams achieve some fame in their childhood for saving the lives of their newborn sisters, and seven other infants, during the raid on Amaterasu by hiding them in a janitor's closet. **

**Ka'hairal Balak was the son of one of the slavers on Torfan at the time of the Alliance counter attack, who was taken alive, and had his eyes removed. The trauma of what his father endured never left him. **

**The Salarian STG and Asari commandos, from 2204 onward, secretly cooperated with numerous N7 and Cerberus raids on other slaver stations throughout the galaxy. **


	11. The Verge War: The Storm Breaks

**2211: The Verge War-The Storm Breaks**

With the founding of Alliance colonies on Elysium, Mindior, and Antibaar, the last of the Hegemony's patience for humanity ran out. No longer able to launch slaver raids against human space effectively with the destruction of Torfan, they turned to their weapon of last resort; galactic diplomacy. The batarian representative to the Citadel demanded that the Council declare the Skylline Verge a "zone of batarian interest", and to force the humans off the worlds they had settled. Again, however, the Council sided with the Alliance, declaring that the Verge was open to human colonization.

Although the Council did not exclude the Hegemony from colonizing the Verge also, the batarian ambassador declared it proof that the Council had completely abandoned the Hegemony in favor of their "pet" humans (it was difficult for the Council to discredit that line of thought; it had recently been made known that the Asari Councilor, Tevos, and the new human ambassador, Donnel Udina, were in a romantic relationship), and stormed out of the meeting, declaring that the Alliance would not stand in the Hegemony's way.

The last attempt to achieve a diplomatic solution to the situation occurred a few days after the disastrous meeting with the Citadel Council. Councilor Tevos, working Ambassador Udina, set up a last-ditch meeting between the human and batarian officials. Udina, despite his great personal disgust for the Hegemony, put aside his own feelings and offered a compromise to the batarian government; a joint human-batarian scouting operation would be conducted in every star system in the Verge near an active mass relay. Once all garden worlds and resource deposits within the sector of space were found and marked, they would be divided into equal parts to be colonized by both powers at a later date. Given the Alliance's policy of behaving as though the batarian government did not even exist, the plan Udina put forward was a remarkable show of restraining their own anger, especially after the Amaterasu Massacre. The human and the asari were both confident that the batarian ambassador would accept compromise; the amount of potential territory and resources the Alliance were prepared to give the batarians was unprecedented.

Both of them failed to take into account that the Hegemony's pride knew no logic.

The batarian diplomat immediately refused the generous offer, and reiterated the Hegemony's demand that the Alliance surrender the entire Skyllian Verge to them. When Udina refused, he left the room without another word.

Udina and Tevos left the room half an hour later, looking rather disheveled and with guilty smiles on their faces.

By the end of the week, the Hegemony had closed its embassy on the Citadel, and withdrawn membership from Citadel Space. Even before this, the Systems Alliance had begun to mobilize for war; drafts had been enabled, bringing the military total to 1,200,000,000 individuals. The numbers of warships under construction was increased and work on the six new carriers and dreadnoughts, the _McKinley_, _Shasta_, _Etna_, _Thomas Edison_, _Nicola Tesla_, and _Karl Marx_, continued around the clock. Minor mining colonies in the Skyllian Verge were evacuated, colonists on Elysium and Mindior were being sent to shelters deep in the wilderness that had been built for this very purpose, and stealth frigate flotillas stood watch at every relay leading toward Alliance space, waiting for the attack that everyone in the galaxy knew was inevitable.

In addition to all this, Parliament began actively seeking assistance from the other Citadel powers, mainly the three Council members as they were the only ones that held any significant military power. The Salarian Union promised up to the minute information from all of their STG units operating in the Hegemony, the Turian Hierarchy provided weapons and ground vehicles to supplement the Alliance factories in exchange for star charts of some newly discovered dextro-garden worlds the humans had found in the Attican Traverse. The Asari Republics provided, by far, the most assistance; the Matriarch Council set at four divisions of Asari Commandos, and an entire fleet including the dreadnought _Unyielding Hierophant_, as an expeditionary force. The Commandos were spread out amongst the colonies closest to the 314 relay to augment Alliance guerilla attacks should they fall, and Asari fleet stood by the human held end of the pair, alongside the 2nd and 3rd Alliance fleets.

When the blow fell, however, it did not fall where the Alliance expected. Instead of striking directly at the new Skyllian colonies, the Hegemony attacked the least thought of, and unevacuated, Antibaar terraforming bases. Hegemony marine forces landed on the planet, captured the centers almost intact, and killed all the workers that they found. Any batarian Alliance citizens captured suffered particularly gruesome deaths.

Because they destroyed the local comm buoys, the Hegemony forces believed the Alliance unaware of their attack. Unfortunately, they again forgot to take the stealth frigates into account, and these vessels virtually waltzed past the batarian navy, through the relay, and sent an emergency message to Arcturus Station; the Batarian Hegemony had launched an unprovoked attack on humanity's sovereignty, without a declaration of war, and had slaughtered Alliance citizens. In an emergency meeting, Parliament declared a state of war between the Systems Alliance and the Batarian Hegemony, and began turning its industry towards full war production. At the same time, Salarian information and Turian weapons began to arrive.

Meanwhile, the Batarian Hegemony continued its assault on human space, sending fleets to seize Mindior and Elysium. However, by the time they got there, the populations had already evacuated to the massive pre-built shelters; the cities and towns were so empty, it was though they had never been inhabited. Smirking at what they perceived to be a good break, they stationed skeleton units and squadrons of scout drones to seek out any Alliance personnel or citizens they could find. With these worlds under their control, they gathered their two fleets together, numbering two dreadnoughts, 30 cruisers, and 50 frigates at the uncontrolled end of the 314 relay pair. Believing they had caught the Alliance completely off guard, the batarian admirals pressed the attack, thinking that they could break the gun line in a surprise attack.

What they found instead was a prepared, briefed, and determined Alliance armada, consisting of the gun line, the 2nd and 3rd fleets, and the asari expeditionary fleet. The battle quickly turned into a route, with the Hegemony suffering 20 frigates and 8 cruisers destroyed and one dreadnought badly damaged, for the Alliance's 3 cruisers, 8 destroyers, and 9 asari frigates destroyed, and another 4 cruisers damaged, though only one severely. One of the most notable features of the battle was the performance of the Alliance destroyers; a single "wolfpack" of the larger ships was often able to fight off two such groups of Hegemony frigates.

The battle was a sobering realization for the Hegemony; far from catching the Alliance off-guard, they had in fact been led into a trap that had cost them dearly. Even worse, they had, at the very least, limited military assistance from at least one major Council member. This was made doubly apparent when Asari Commandos began launching raids in coordination with Alliance guerilla troops on the two captured Verge colonies.

With their only other option for striking the humans directly being to invade Citadel Space to acquire one of the other relays leading to Alliance space, the Hegemony began to concentrate its navy at their end of the 314 relay pair, both to prepare for another attack against the human led fleet, and to meet the inevitable Alliance counterattack.

Which the Alliance did. But not in the way the Hegemony expected.


	12. Shield Walls and Dagger Men

**2211-2212: The Verge War-Shield Walls and Dagger Men**

Having weathered the initial assault, and with the upset at the 314 relay under its belt, the Alliance military took stock of the situation. They had secured their main territory against attack, and had successfully evacuated most of its colonists from the Verge and dismantled their infrastructure, rendering them useless to the Hegemony. In the aftermath of the main assault on the gun line, the Alliance had scavenged the wrecked hulks of the destroyed warships of both sides; some were stripped for scrape, but others, particularly the Hegemony ships lost to electronic attacks, were taken back to the Alliance shipyards to be repaired and refurbished and, in the latter's case, forcibly converted.

The greatest Achilles Heel in the Alliance's defense plans were the millions of colonists in the bunkers of Elysium and Mindior. Although they were safe for the moment and Alliance and Commando raids had the small batarian garrisons reeling, the fact remained that those people were on a time crunch; the bunkers only had enough food to last the inhabitants two and a half years at most. Supplemental hunting and hydroponic farming could only extend that time by a few months at most. Once that time ran out, they would be forced to surrender to the Hegemony, and undoubtedly enslaved, or resort to cannibalism.

For the time being, though, they were not in grave danger of defeat. They had already turned back one trans-relay assault, and quickly did the same to two more. By the last of these engagements, the causality count stood at 50 frigates and 18 cruisers destroyed with two dreadnoughts heavily damaged for the Hegemony, and 22 asari frigates, 17 destroyers, and 9 cruisers destroyed with one dreadnought and one fixed gun each suffering moderate damage for the Alliance. Once the Hegemony had finally ceased its assault, the human/asari fleet launched a hit-and run counterattack on the batarian fleet stationed on the other side of the relay. The dreadnoughts, battlecruisers, and cruisers fired a single volley, and then fell back to human space without staying to fight. The raid resulted in a further 9 ships destroyed, including the dreadnought _Domination, _for no losses. Furious at the destruction of the battleship, the Batarian admirals brought up even more of their fleets to the area. Within a few weeks of this blockade, slightly more than half of the entire Hegemony navy was located at the batarian end of the 314 relay pair.

Exactly as the Alliance intended.

As soon as the proverbial trenches had been dug, and the batarian hold on the relay system was considered unbreakable, the wolfpacks struck. Ever since the start of hostilities, human stealth frigates had been spreading throughout both the Skyllian Verge, and even the core Hegemony systems. Now, they were unleashed on the batarian merchant ships and the scant military patrols of the much reduced defending fleets.

The results were devastating. Inside of a month, no less than 150 trading, colonist, military, and merchant vessels had been destroyed, with 40 more electronically disabled and looted by marines. Vessels from the colony Camala were particularly tempting targets for the latter form of attack; the desert planet was the largest producer of element zero in the Hegemony, and the smash-and-grab attacks drained hundreds of thousands of credits from their enemy's economy, while at the same time cutting Alliance military need for the substance in half for the foreseeable future; this was a great boon for the human economy, for while they had discovered numerous veins of eezo since first contact, they remained dependant on enormous imports from Thessia. Cerberus and STG infiltrators were of particular usefulness in this regard, as they could readily give the exact date, time, and location the shipments would leave the planet.

The batarian military leaders were humiliated by the extremely damaging attacks, and immediately called back frigates and cruisers from the 314 relay to destroy the Unterseeboots. However, these ships had a hard time attacking, and a harder time doing actual damage when they could. The human wolf packs could hide in the infinite amount of empty space in and around the batarian systems, and the only means of protection the batarians had to locate them was line of sight, which could only be used at "knife fight" ranges, by which point the Unterseeboots had long since launched their torpedoes and electronic bombs.

The Hegemony began scrambling in a desperate attempt to save face and curb the damage. Already, they had fabricated a story of faulty life support systems on the ships, and began organizing all supply and merchant traffic into convoys in order to mutually assist any ships that suffered these defects, with military escorts to defend against any "pirates". In addition, the Hegemony began to mass manufacture probes to follow the convoys until as they passed through batarian space. These probes could spot the Alliance frigates and track them, allowing for the escorts to concentrate on the frigates and overwhelm them.

This strategy did produce results in the first few weeks after its adaptation; several wolf packs of Unterseeboots were caught and destroyed, resulting in the Alliance losing 25 such ships. However, they quickly adapted to the tactic, and began disabling the probes in the area of their approach. Later, they learned to disable probes away from their area of attack; when the batarian escorts concentrated on the area of lost sight, the stealth frigates came in, wrecked havoc, and fled again.

The Alliance continued this economic warfare unabated for over a year. Trade for Hegemony colonies dried up like water on a hot pan, and supply lines became increasingly stretched. The fleet at their end of the 314 relay pair began to withdraw further back to batarian space, because the shipments of food, water, and fuel simply weren't arriving in the quantities required to maintain their presence. On the other hand, Alliance raids were only growing fiercer, and more numerous; the now highly experienced sailors of the Unterseeboots were brought in to train new submarine sailors, and the establishment of numerous asteroid bases, called "lagoons" by those who used them, supplied by specially built stealthed merchant ships, allowed the wolf packs to strike in all corners of the Hegemony. Some colonies had to be evacuated because of starvation, and the Hegemony's economy was entering a severe recession that was threatening to spiral out of control.

Utilizing a great deal of emergency funds, the Hegemony's leaders purchased the locations of several lagoons from the Shadow Broker in a last ditch effort to combat the Unterseeboots. Unfortunately for them, Cerberus double-agents got wind of the information, and alerted the targeted lagoons without the Hegemony or the Shadow Broker knowing about it. When the batarian fleets arrived at the locations and landed troops on the bases, the Alliance sailors detonated pre-set explosives, utterly destroying the hollowed out asteroids, launching attacks that destroyed or mauled almost a dozen frigates and cruisers, and then fled back to Alliance space before the Hegemony could recover.

Within days of the loss of the lagoons, no less than three large Shadow Broker bases were destroyed, and their occupants slaughtered to the last. The only evidence at each of these bases was a small picture of a three-headed dog. At one, there was a datapad that held the locations of four more such bases the Broker had thought were undiscovered.

Immediately, the Shadow Broker pulled out any support for the Hegemony war effort.

Although initially furious over the Broker's betrayal, there were two small victories that showed the Hegemony was not completely out. The first was the discovery and capture of several bunkers on Mindior, striking a blow to Alliance morale and sending several tens of thousands of slaves to work in the plantations and mines of batarian colonies. The second was the near completion of the four dreadnoughts had been started construction in secret before the batarian withdrawal from the Citadel. Combined with the remaining six battleships in their possession, the Hegemony leaders were confident that a new offensive against the Alliance gun line would break through, allowing them to take the fight to human space directly, and forcing the Alliance to fight a conventional war that they could not win.

The egotistical leaders of the Hegemony believed themselves quite clever, constructing these vessels illegally under the Council's very nose.

But the truth was far more sinister.

Jack and Eva Harper had _always _known of the dreadnoughts' existence, and had _allowed _them to be built in order to tie up as much of the Hegemony's manpower and resources as possible.

And now that the battleships were on the cusp of leaving dry-dock, Cerberus and Alliance Unterseeboots, numbering 12 wolf packs with 5 vessels per pack, moved in for the slaughter.

oo-00-oo

**Fun Fact Time!**

**If Shepard has the Spacer background, his mother, Hannah, will mention that she destroyed or captured 29 military and civilian craft during the Verge War while captaining the **_**El Alemein**_**, and that Shepard's batarian brother was an orphaned slave child she adopted after rescuing him from slave barge when he was a baby. **

**The makers of Galaxy of Fantasy, a game that claims references to Turian Mythology but totally doesn't have in game analogues to all the known species in a world that is total not the galaxy, recently released a new set of in-game narrative where the race that is totally not the batarians unjustly attacked the newly discovered peaceful elves that are total not humanity causing the normally harmless beings to turn into legions of Balrogs and Succubae, set the entire not-batarian territory alight, and allow the players to choose which side to support. Really.**

**Kaidon Alenko begins to suffer from severe migraines brought about by his new L2 biotic implants, by far the most serious reaction to the devices seen thus far. Although such severe symptoms are rare in those given the new implants, the Alliance declares the cost unacceptable, and immediately begins research into a safer L3. The Alenko family, and all other families with biotic children that experienced such side effects from the L2s, are immediately given reparations, and free health care for any further medical conditions that result from the implants for the remainder of their lives. **


	13. The Verge War: The Skyllian Blitz

**2212-2213: The Verge War- The Skyllian Blitz**

Before the Hierarchy was even aware of the fact that their almost completed new dreadnought squadron was obliterated, the Alliance struck again on the main front. For over a year, while their frigate wolfpacks had eviscerated the Hegemony's trade, the Alliance had labored to expand its conventional navy. Now, at last, after more than a year of construction, they had brought their naval strength up to 6 dreadnoughts, 15 carriers, 35 battlecruisers, 85 cruisers, 160 destroyers, and 200 frigates, even with the losses they had suffered so far.

In addition, they had designed and constructed three more ships of an entirely new class, the Shock Dreadnought. Shaped like an umbrella, these kilometer long vessels had extraordinarily thick frontal armor and kinetic barriers half again as powerful as any other ship of their class, and were easily the fastest ships of their size. Again forgoing the massive spinal cannons, or even a few dozen broadside cannons, these vessels mounted hundreds of small mass drivers on their flanks, capable of firing far more rapidly than even a destroyer's main cannon, and hundreds of torpedo banks. When concentrated on a target, these individually minuscule weapons could overwhelm a ship's kinetic barriers and rip them to pieces. Named for great water bodies of Earth, the Pacific-Class Shock Dreadnoughts stood ready alongside their counterparts, their crews eager to whet their new ships' teeth on the Hegemony navy.

Since the start of the war, the Alliance Parliament had been requesting that the Council permit them to allow its navy passage through the Attican Traverse, so that they could launch an attack on the batarian flank. In 2212, they had finally succeeded, and half the Alliance fleet gathered just beyond the outer batarian colonies in the Verge. The instant that Cerberus reported the destruction of the Batarian's nearly completed dreadnoughts, prepositioned stealth frigates disabled the static defensive lines along the Verge's border with the Traverse and the comm buoys leading to their headquarters and the main Hegemony force at the 314 relay. Spearheaded by battlecruisers and the _McKinley, Fiji, and Shasta, _the Alliance 1st, 4th, and the newly formed 5th fleets smashed through the batarian-controlled Verge. The thinly spaced batarian fleets in the area were swept aside before the onslaught. Nor was the Alliance slowed to siege colonies; they seized fuel and supply depots with marine forces, and destroyed all other space board assets around the planets and moved on, leaving Unterseeboots to guard the systems.

This lightning attack continued until the fleets took back the systems where Elysium and Mindior were located; Alliance marines and Asari Commandos had already eradicated the last remnants of the batarian garrisons, which were on their last legs after a year of constant hit and run attacks.

At the same time as this counterattack started, the Alliance 2nd and 3rd fleets, with the asari expeditionary fleet in reserve, launched limited attacks on the Hegemony fleet concentrated at the 314 relay. This marked the first appearance of the Shock Dreadnoughts in galactic warfare. Speeding through the relay, the _Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic _swiftly closed with the batarian fleet, followed closely by battlecruisers and their destroyer escorts. Avoiding most of the batarian barrage with speed and maneuverability, the ships passed through the Hegemony formations, blasting their cruisers and frigates to pieces. After fleeing to FTL, they repeated this action three more times before finally they were forced to retreat back to Alliance space. The final casualty count for the battle was 1 battlecruiser and 8 destroyers for 17 frigates and 3 cruisers.

With the main fleet bloodied and surrounded, the Alliance finally launched the first true fleet battle of the Verge War, and by the time they did, they had long since ensured that it was entirely in their favor. The Hegemony armada had been surrounded and under attack for several days, completely cut off from supply, and rapidly running out of food, water, and fuel. In addition, they were outnumbered and attacked on multiple sides. On top of all of this, they could not retreat to other systems and regroup, as they would be hunted down and destroyed piecemeal. All of these things forced the batarian ships to stay and fight to the end.

The Battle of the 314 Relay ended in complete disaster for the Hegemony. Almost all of the ships at located at the Relay, a third of the entire Batarian navy, 67 cruisers and 155 frigates, were destroyed or captured by the Alliance and their Asari allies. Included in the casualties were four of the Batarian's dreadnoughts; during the last stage of the battle, the last three of the ships had led half of the surviving frigates and cruisers in a breakout attempt back to Hegemony space. They succeeded in escaping, damaging one human dreadnought and destroying the carrier _Marco Polo. _However, just as the dreadnoughts were about to escape, a badly damaged Alliance destroyer, _March to the Sea, _overrode its safety measures and went to FTL while aiming at the flagship of the armada, _Manifest Destiny_, obliterating both vessels. Immediately, the Alliance took stock of its own, comparatively light, losses, reformed its ranks, and began to prepare to launch an invasion into the Batarian Hegemony.

Now, however, the human war effort stalled. Many Alliance citizens questioned whether an invasion was necessary. Hadn't they already fulfilled their goals? They had reclaimed their territory, held their own against a power many centuries their senior, and had inflicted so much damage on the Hegemony that it would take years, if not decades, to fully recover. What, then, was the point of continuing the war? For all intents and purposes, they had already won.

Then, the Harpers came forward with a bombshell. Cerberus had received word from one of their batarian infiltrators of a secret research base on the planet Pragia. The planet had been the Hegemony's attempt to make their own "Eden Prime", a massive farming colony that could feed vast amounts of its people. Unfortunately, their less than effective attempts at ensuring ecological stability ended with the non-native plant life growing out of control, and spreading across the planet. Instead of taking responsibility for their failure and attempting to set the damage right, the Batarians simply left the planet. Alliance scientists predicted that the planet's soil would be completely exhausted in four centuries, and this caused much ire amongst Alliance citizens, given their love of nature.

Following the informant's information, Cerberus commandos found the base, and uncovered its purpose; it was a biotic research base, attempting to find ways to boost biotic potential in the Hegemony's population, or find new ways to grant biotic powers. The most successful method seen so far was to place nanobots along the subject's nervous system, each containing a minute amount of of eezo. Once the operation was completed, and biotic amps installed in the subject, the person could than wield biotic abilities as though they had been born with them. After further refinement by Cerberus, the operation was made pain and side-effect free.

The operatives also found the Hegemony's test subjects.

They had been using human biotic children, taken from the bunkers that had been found on Mindior, as guinea pigs.

Once this information made it to the public, any thought of ending the war after the victory at the Relay evaporated. With the Amaterasu Massacre still fresh in the Alliance's memory, another such crime could not end with anything less than the total destruction of the guilty party. The human and alien populations of the SA immediately threw themselves into total war production, as the six fleets they commanded surged into the Verge, seizing each and every Hegemony world in that sector of space after leaving them under siege for extended periods. Most surrendered quickly after hearing the news of the military disaster the humans had inflicted on their government. Some, where civilian unrest was bordering on open rebellion due to their wishing to immigrate to human space, overthrew their colonial governments before the human fleets ever arrived, and requested to join the Alliance government.

By the time the second year of The Verge War ended, the balance had vastly shifted to the Alliance. The entirety of the Skyllian Verge was under its occupation, and its fleets were poised to strike at the Hegemony's core regions. They had inflicted massive casualties on the Hegemony navy while suffering few losses themselves, and its warship production easily redressed the balance. With the Cerberus and Asari fleets blustering its numbers, they could now meet the Hegemony on equal numerical fields.

However, these massive victories notwithstanding, the System's Alliance had lost several advantages. In the first year of the war, the humans had been fighting on their home territory, with their enemy's supply lines stretched long. Now, the opposite was true. In addition, the core systems of the Hegemony were far more heavily fortified than the Verge colonies, and far more loyal to their government; there would be no rebellions and assistance from the civilian population here.

**A.N. **

**I'd like to send a shout out t (remove spaces), who gave me the initial idea that lead to the Shock Dreadnoughts. His suggestion was that I make Shielded Frontal Assault Carriers, umbrella/mushroom shaped ships with thick frontal armor and strong shields that could charge the enemy fleet's line, and release its fighters and interceptors at point blank range. I was going to take them as is, but I realized one major problem; if a carrier gets within range of a capital ship's main guns, whether in real life or in Mass Effect, SOMETHING HAS GONE TERRIBLY WRONG! So, I took the idea, and changed it so that it would make more sense. Thanks for the idea, Rel! **


	14. The Verge War:New Fronts

**2213: New Fronts**

Now that they had suffered the most utterly humiliating military defeat since the Krogan Rebellions, the leaders of the Hegemony finally acknowledged that the human System's Alliance was a dangerous and highly effective force. Far from achieving their goal of a quick, decisive victory of subjugation, forced vassalization, and enslavement of humanity, their military had been torn to pieces and the territory they had hoped to colonize had been wrested from them by a supposed inferior people, often with the assistance of their own traitorous subjects. Their plan of long, attritional land battles had been proven useless, as the Alliance would simply bypass them and starve them out, even valuable garden worlds. On top of all of this, they had lost 9 of their 11 dreadnoughts, 4 of them before they ever even saw combat.

However, the iron-fisted rulers of the Batarians were quick to spin this information in as positive a light as possible. Utilizing their vast propaganda infrastructure, they spoke of the defeats they had suffered as "cowardly acts by a lesser species that could not fight a real battle." Appealing to the notion of the Batarian's perceived superiority, they began to rally the citizens of the Hegemony to rise up and put the humans and their alien pets in their place. Given that these were the planets that held so many Hegemony supporters, most responded to the call as the core regions of Batarian space were whipped into a frenzy of hatred. Defensive emplacements throughout the sector of space were strengthened, military recruitment rose to the point where any casualties suffered in the previous years were easily made right, and warship production rose to unprecedented levels for the nation. They also began to construct 5 new dreadnoughts to replace those they had lost, though this time the various parts of the ship were constructed in shipyards across Hegemony space; that way if the Alliance attacked, they would only destroy a handful of the parts under construction.

It was not just in the orders of magnitude that they were building, though; so thoroughly incensed was the Batarian government that they even began designing their own destroyers, battlecruisers, and carriers, their desire for victory outweighing their disgust for humanity's innovation. The first Batarian carrier, the _Vengeance_, was on active duty before the year was out, and provided an upset by defeating an Alliance task force, destroying 4 destroyers and a cruiser, due to overwhelming numbers of strike craft, which the Alliance had long believed to be an advantage it would always hold.

Finally, the Hegemony adopted the Alliance commerce and supply line raiding strategies, and began sending flotillas of its own frigates to hunt down and destroy human supply ships and lone military craft. However, they were not nearly as effective at the practice as the Alliance was, for two major reasons. First, the Batarian frigates lacked stealth drives, and were easily detected before they got within fighting range; thus, the Hegemony ships were forced to retreat far earlier in a battle before reinforcements arrived and they were overwhelmed. Second, they simply lacked experience in that manner of fighting. Human frigate crews had trained in supply raiding doctrine for decades, and now had two years combat experience under their belts, and so were far more effective. And it was not long before the Alliance organized its supply ships into conveys with Unterseeboots for protection; very quickly, the Hegemony raiders found that they themselves were the prey as they were blown out of space before they could do significant damage.

Frustrated at the stubbornness and, to them, surprising ability of the Alliance's war making skills, the Hegemony began to settle in for a long siege until they were again strong enough to go on the offensive.

On the other side of the equation, the human-run government that had just inflicted an unprecedented upset on a seemingly superior power was at a loss as to how to proceed. They knew that the relay defenses at the edge of the Hegemony core area were powerful, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. Raiding by battlecruisers and stealth frigates was doing some damage, but it was quickly being made right by the massive increase in production the Hegemony had instigated. It soon became clear to the men and women of the Alliance navy that the "death by a thousand cuts" strategy was no longer going to produce the wanted results. The only way forward was to attack directly, and this guaranteed massive casualties they could ill afford.

Still, the Alliance position was not completely untenable. With the "2nd Stalingrad" victory at the 314 relay, and the following Blitz of the Verge, the two nations' navies were on equal footing in terms of numbers. In addition, their lanes of supply and support in the Skyllian Verge were surprisingly strong, due mainly to the numerous rebellions occurring on Hegemony fringe colonies in the sector. These same colonies were devoting any and all of their resources to the Systems Alliance's war effort, and with good reason; they knew that if the humans lost, they would suffer a fate arguably worse than death.

As the war entered this new faze, where the roles of the combatants were reversed, the galaxy looked on with bated breath, wondering which of the two combatants would emerge victorious, and which would strike the first major blow of this phase of the conflict.

Ultimately, the Alliance beat the Hegemony to the punch.

**A.N. **

"**What are the relations like between the humans and the quarians?" **

"**How are the krogan and quarians getting along with the new Paragon humans?" **

"**Where are the quarian and krogan relations chapters?" **

"**Hey MB, are you ever going to talk about the quarians and krogan in this fic?" **

**I WILL GET TO THEM EVENTUALLY, PEOPLE! CALM DOWN!**

**Sorry, I've just gotten tons of reviews and PMs lately regarding that point. It is starting to get on my nerves. I haven't done the quarians and krogan in this story because they, for the most part, are considered outside Citadel society, and often outside of Citadel Space entirely. And because the humans at this point have such a strong sense of inadequacy, they don't much venture outside of the space of their new friends, so contact with quarians and krogan for the Alliance has been limited to the occasional mercenary and underage quarian on pilgrimage. Not much for Parliament to go off of. **

**Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but this fic now bears the "Octo8 Seal of Approval". For those that don't know, Octo8 is, so far as I know, the definitive word on Paragoness on this site. So, if he says that I have captured the essence of being a Paragon, believe it.**

**Which is to say, I was nice to biotics. **

**I really hope he doesn't play the Dragon Age games. He would FREAK if he saw the Circle of Magi, the Templar Order and the Chantry. **


	15. The Verge War: Cracking the Shell

**2213: Cracking the Shell**

In the weeks following the wildly successful Skyllian Blitz, the Alliance consolidated their positions at the edges of the Hegemony's inner colonies. Fuel and supply stations were constructed or repaired, regular patrols were sent to guard all mass relays the batarians could attack from, and disabled defense stations were repaired and turned against their builders. Once this had been accomplished, efforts turned to trying to find a way to continue their assault on their foe. Most centered on a direct attack along contested space, with few variations in the plans aside from which area should be the main focus; all such operations were scrapped due to the heinous casualties that would result from it.

Finally, one Alliance Rear Admiral, Steven Hackett, came forward with a radically different plan; at the middle of Hegemony space were three relay clusters, all heavily fortified. These contained the only three know relays that connected to the two halves on the Hegemony's core systems. Taking them would cut the Hegemony in two and break all communication between the planets and ships on either side of the clusters. Both halves could then be mopped up independently.

Alliance command was initially skeptical about the plan; invading such a narrow area of space would invite attack from both sides, meaning the ships that seized the clusters would be in danger of being cut off and destroyed just as the Alliance had done with the Hegemony's main fleet. In addition, half the human navy would have to ensure that the relay clusters were taken and held; this would leave the remaining fleets guarding the rest of the front dangerously stretched. Supporters of Hackett's idea countered that numerous other such operations, such as Washington's attack on Trenton and Hannibal's strategy at Cannea, had also seemed doomed to failure but had often produced wild successes. The debate raged back and forth for days, causing a stalling in the Alliance military that if the Batarians had known of and acted upon could have spelled disaster.

The verbal civil war finally ended when Jack Harper himself finally announced that he had looked over the plan, and had full confidence that it would work. He was so convinced that Hackett's proposal would bring victory, in fact, that he offered that the Cerberus Fleet spearhead the attack. With such a high ranking, influential leader backing the proposal, Alliance command relented and agreed to implement the so called "Hackett plan", under the code name "Operation Garrote".

Nicknamed "The Odd Assault" due to the numbers of the fleets making the attack, 1, 3, and 5, Operation Garrote began, as per usual, with an Unterseeboot first strike. Although the electronic firewalls protecting the inner defenses of Hegemony space were much more robust than those of the outer colonies, countering these defenses was an Alliance specialty; several were turned against their owners and almost all were kept too busy to fight off the invading human ships.

The 1st, 3rd, and 5th fleets surged into each of the three systems like a giant wrecking ball, smashing the defenders and destroying the comm. buoys of each of the clusters in turn. Within a few hours, the systems were under total human control; the Hegemony had been split down the middle. At the same time, the 2nd, 4th, and asari expeditionary fleets had been launching diversionary attacks on both halves of Hegemony controlled space, keeping the batarian fleets from reinforcing the main area of attack.

However, once they were fully aware of just what had occurred, the naval forces of the Batarian Hegemony immediately launched attacks from both ends of their empire to retake the relay clusters. The majority of the attacks were repulsed with high losses for the Batarians; the Hegemony was still dealing with hit and run attacks along its entire border, and could not bring the numbers necessary to dislodge the human ships; with an entire fleet at each relay system, Alliance tactical numeric superiority was assured. Eventually, the batarian admirals realized this and began to concentrate their attacks on one relay system at a time. The results were little different, however; with not coordination between the two sides of Hegemony space, the human fleets were able to hold off the attacks on either batarian fleet in turn.

The final Hegemony counterattack, however, came dangerously close to succeeding. By pure chance, the warships on both ends of the now split region struck at the center relay cluster, held by the 5th fleet, at the exact same time. For the first time in the war, the Alliance found itself fighting a battle where they were outnumbered, a situation that they had always maneuvered to avoid. The Third Battle of the Kintha Relay Cluster very nearly ended in disaster for the humans; within a short time they were squeezed by the Hegemony pincer movement, its flagship, the _Fiji,_ had been destroyed, and the admiral leading the fleet had died with it. Then, at the last possible moment, Rear Admiral Hackett, the mastermind of the entire operation, pulled a coup; he had the three surviving destroyers under his command close with and launch their torpedoes at the flank of the batarian dreadnought leading the operation,the _Subjugation._ The missiles impacted on the dreadnoughts hull and destroyed the emitters that projected the ship's kinetic barriers. Hackett than ordered his own ship, the cruiser _Pittsburg, _to jump to FTL, coming out _inside_ the batarian formation, and fired four mass accelerator rounds into the hole of the _Subjugation's_ shields, gutting the ship and rupturing the reactor. In the instant it took Hackett to jump back to the human lines, the dreadnought detonated internally.

With the destruction of one of their two remaining dreadnoughts, the Hegemony stalled, reeling from the loss; it had occurred so fast, and at a time when their victory seemed assured, they did not understand what had happened or how it had happened. The Alliance crews, the moment before on the verge of collapse, rallied, and counterattacked cutting down the dazed batarian ships. Not long after this, reinforcements from the 1st, 3rd, and Cerberus fleets arrived and drove both halves of their foe from the system. More than half of the ships that attempted to fall back to "East Hegemony" as it came to be known were surrounded and annihilated to the last, leaving that area of space dangerously unprotected.

The success of Operation Garrote could never be overestimated. With their enemy's space cut in half, and both pieces completely cut off from each other, the Batarian Hegemony was completely crippled. The leaders in "West" and "East" had only half the resources to wage war, and no way to coordinate with each other. Compounding this problem was the fact that the Batarian command structure was extremely centralized; independent action was discouraged, and naval officers had the practice of never acting without direct orders from their superiors drilled into them. For the vessels in "West" Hegemony, this was not an issue, as the Hegemony's leaders and Kar'shan were located there, but those in the "East" were crippled by indecision, unable to mount their own campaigns, or in some case even keep order on the colonies in the sector.

Those that were caught in this trap soon found themselves being stabbed in the back as well as the front, by those they had long believed inconsequential.

**A.N. **

**This story is now in the community called Alternate First Contact War. *swoons***

**Up for some more fun facts? **

**By the time Operation Garrote ended, Jack and Eva Harper had finalized their adoption of three of the children from the Hegemony's Pragia research facility; Miranda and Oriana Lawson, and a third girl who only refers to herself as Jack. **

**Urdnot Wrex has made a small fortune from Alliance contracts to liberate slaves from batarian worlds. He has also conveniently forgotten to tell them that he personally is disgusted with the Hegemony's slaving practice, as it has resulted in the deaths and captures of several other mercenaries that he knows and respects, and would have gone on such missions for free. **

**For his brainstorming of Operation Garrote and his near-suicidal attack on the **_**Subjugation,**_** Steven Hackett was promoted to Admiral and given command of the 5****th**** fleet. His controversial choice of making the **_**Pittsburg**_** his flagship en lue of a dreadnought is looked upon with worry, and the **_**Kilimanjaro**_** immediately begins construction at Arcturus Station. **

**Commander David Anderson, commanding officer of the destroyer **_**Michael, **_**the only surviving ship under Hackett's command at the time, was promoted to Captain for his act of courage, then transferred to the 4****th**** fleet given that the ship's flotilla had been whipped out. He and his crew would continue to serve with distinction until the end of the Verge War.**____


	16. The Verge War: The Collaspe

**2213-2215: The Collapse**

With the Alliance firmly entrenched at the target relay junctions deep in the Batarian core systems, the Hegemony was irrevocably cut in two. Uncoordinated and drained from its attempts to push back the human ships, they were helpless to try and break this hold; Batarian space remained split in "East" and "West" sections until the end of the war. Kar'shan was still well protected, as it was in the half where the majority of the remaining Hegemony warships were located, and the dictators thereupon began to dig in their heels for the next assault.

However, those trapped in the "East" Hegemony quickly found themselves far worse off. Conditioned to wait for orders from their government before taking action, the scattered captains and rear admirals of the batarian ships wandered aimlessly amongst the star systems of their sector of space, only reacting to Alliance attacks and never organizing an effective defense to them. Increasingly, the batarian leaders in this sector began relying on attritional warfare; in order to strike deeper into Hegemony space, the human forces needed supply bases, which now meant they had to secure, capture, and hold batarian colonies.

Because of this, "East" Hegemony was quickly drained of middle and lower class citizens, who were drafted in ludicrous amounts to be planted on worlds in the Alliance's path to hold against their invasions. While this strategy did slow down the invasions of batarian colonies, especially when Hegemony fleets were on hand to prevent orbital strikes from Alliance warships, it also resulted in astronomical casualty rates among batarian marines as they were constantly subjected to pincer movements and orbital bombardment once the Hegemony warships were inevitably destroyed or driven off. As the war continued unabated, the number of dead and captured Hegemony soldiers jumped into the hundreds of millions. Eventually, the situation in the sector became so bad for the batarian forces that many times Hegemony colonies and ground forces would surrender as soon as a sizable Alliance force arrived in system.

Then, all hell broke loss.

The largest batarian colony in this part of their space was named Oenomaus, and it was one of its oldest and most successful colonies. Its capital city was built around several rings, each containing a different group of the Hegemony's caste system. At the center were the wealthy aristocrats, than the military officers, the middle citizens such as business owners and farmers, the lower citizens such as workers and construction workers, and finally the squalor huts and hovels of the slaves. With the military constantly conscripting the members of both citizen classes, at gunpoint more often than not, their jobs were increasingly being taken over by those in bondage to the Batarian government. Soon, the enslaved were cooking the food and cleaning the streets of the cities. The elite of the Hegemony saw no need to worry; for centuries, these dregs of society had shuffled about to serve their betters, and the notion that they would rebel now was inconceivable.

Then, one day, a massive viral attack crippled all communications and defenses across Oenomaus. The virus had been uploaded from within the system, bypassing and overwhelming many firewalls. Before the batarian military could find the double agent that made the disaster possible, the entire slave population of the capital rose in rebellion, armed with weapons that had obviously been smuggled in and prepared ahead of time. The Hegemony police and military garrison were swiftly overwhelmed, and Oenomaus's capital descended into chaos as those long oppressed exploded into a vindictive rampage against their former masters. Within hours, the city and the planet were under rebel slave control. When a Hegemony flotilla arrived to determine the situation, they were annihilated by the now hostile surface-to-space mass drivers.

With the fall of Oenomous, slave rebellions began in earnest across the entirety of the "East" Hegemony. Every single garden world colony fell to revolt in a matter of days. In addition to all this, the slaves displayed a surprising amount of military competency, further showing that this plan had been in development for years previous to start, and orchestrated by someone, or a group, that held significant power and influence.

Now cut off from any place to resupply or repair, the Hegemony fleet in the sector fell swiftly to renewed Alliance attacks. 2/3rds of the remaining warships were destroyed or captured. Faced with utter destruction, and unable to contact or reach the rest of batarian space, the last living Hegemony admiral gathered the last of the battered fleet, and fled through the Attican Traverse to the Terminus Systems.

With the Hegemony at last expunged from the area, the newly freed slaves quickly found themselves in a world they were completely unprepared to deal with; total freedom. A handful of liberated slaves and civilian collaborators reactivated the comm. buoys in the system, and reached out to the other planets in the sector. Within a few hours, a stream of communications between these newly liberated colonies was established, and the leaders of each individual rebellion began to discuss what they should do next. Most immediately decided that they would need to form a larger overarching government encompassing all the colonies, in order to provide mutual protection and support for each other.

Within days, representatives from each of the planets met on Oenomous, and hammered out a basic structure for their new government, drawing heavily from sources on the formation of the Systems Alliance. Around a month after the rebellions had begun, the formation of the Free Batarian Coalition was announced to the galaxy, and its leaders requested diplomatic acknowledgement. The System's Alliance recognized the FBC as a sovereign state almost immediately, and dispatched a diplomatic team to Oenomous.

Unfortunately for the Hegemony, the Alliance's priority remained their destruction rather than fostering relations with a new state.

oo-00-oo

**I am not going to say that Cerberus and the N7 organization were fostering and planning out the rebellions that lead to the formation of the Free Batarian Coalition for several decades before the Verge War ever began. Nor will I say that the Asari Republics were involved hand and fist in these efforts after the Amaterasu Massacre. Or that half the colonial representatives that formed the government were Cerberus agents. **

**Why will I not say this? Well, because now that I've claimed that the possibility exists, I doubt you will accept any other conclusion. **


	17. The Verge War: The SITD, and the Inferno

**2215-2218: The Shot in the Dark, and the Inferno**

The fall of "East" Hegemony and the rise of the Free Batarian Coalition signaled the death kneels of the Batarian Hegemony. Left to focus on the single remaining front, and now actually outnumbered by the Alliance Fleets and their Asari allies, the writing was on the wall for all to see; given enough time, the Alliance would grind down the Hegemony down to nothing. On top of this, many of the dreadnought parts that they Hegemony had been constructing were in what was now the FBC, and beyond their reach. When the leaders of the nation brought the sections that they still had under their control, they had enough to fully construct two and partially construct another. This left the final dreadnought count at 3 to 6, in favor of the Alliance.

Still, in spite of the massive imbalance of power, the chancellors on Kar'shan still believed that victory was a possibility. With their dreadnought strength partially restored, they planned out an attack in the hopes of catching the human-led forces off-guard. Gathering their forces, they laid out, than acted on, plans that would hopefully push the Alliance back to the border of the Skyllian Verge.

The attack, known as the "Reemergence of the Divine Wind" to the humans that were involved in the fighting, fell far short of the Hegemony's expectations. While the Alliance suffered substantial casualties at each site of battle, the batarians suffered equally. In addition, almost no territory had been regained. The one exception to that was the Adresh star cluster. Rather deep in Hegemony territory, and venerable from numerous other mass relays leading toward it and with no large industry, supply capabilities or strategic resources that could be exploited in such a war, it was considered a liability by the humans, and the Alliance fleets withdrew soon after the Hegemony arrived in system.

However, within a few days of the end of the assault, the batarians received a message from the Asari Republics, who had not received word of the attack yet, offering to broker a cease-fire between the Alliance and the Hegemony. Both governments accepted the offer, but for very different reasons; the humans entered negotiations believing their enemies had at last gained sense and saw their situation as hopeless, while the batarians believed the humans exhausted by the war, and their attack had frightened them into stopping the fighting.

The negotiations, taking place on the Asari diplomatic ship _Athame's Grace _between an unnamed batarian lord and Admiral Hackett_,_ broke down almost immediately as the two brought polarized demands to the table; the Alliance wanted the Batarian Hegemony to acknowledge the independence of the Free Batarain Coalition, ban slavery, and emancipate those in bondage, while his counterpart expected the humans to surrender the main territories seized by the humans during their attack on the core regions of their space and allow them to reconquer their rebellious "property". Neither individual would accept the others request or back down from their own stance. When the batarian lord pointed out that their recent offensive had retaken the Adresh cluster, Hackett responded thusly:

"_Chancellor, do you have any idea how strategically insignificant the Adresh cluster is? It is a matter of profound indifference to the Systems Alliance whether we hold the Adresh cluster or not. I doubt anyone in Alliance space knew that the Adresh cluster __**existed**__ before you launched your assault that retook it! And why did you launch such an attack at all! You are outnumbered, and have enemies closing in on your entire front; your forces already stretched thin trying to defend your frontier. Now you have wasted good lives and ships reclaiming a group of systems that have no real significance and that you cannot hold for any extended period of time. How the Batarian Hegemony has survived __**this **__long with leadership __**this**__ incompetent is something not even the most brilliant salarian could ever hope to understand."_

With that statement of fury and disbelief, the talks came to a complete end, and the Verge War continued to its bitter end. True to Hackett's word, the Hegemony lost control of the Adresh a mere three weeks later to a new Alliance offensive.

The next three years were a complete bloodbath, as the Alliance began sledge hammering through Hegemony's inner defenses. Tens of millions were killed and injured on both sides as the three years went by. The tide of the fighting never shifted, though; slowly but surely, the human fleets sliced away at the empire that had been built up for centuries. By this point the Hegemony was completely collapsing; any semblance of economy or unification between its systems had completely dissolved. Eventually, with no means of supplying itself, the Hegemony navy withdrew to its main anchorage at the Cres system, a single relay jump away from Harsa, where Khar'shan was located. This allowed the human military to occupy the remnants of batarian space with virtually no resistance.

In the final year of the war, after the Alliance had overrun all of Hegemony space except these two clusters, the humans gathered their forces and launched the now-legendary Battle of Cres, which saw the entirety of the Hegemony navy and the vast majority of the Alliance fleets engaged in the largest naval battle since the Krogan Rebellions. The fight lasted for 14 hours before the Alliance finally emerged victorious, though a third of the entire human navy was lost in the action. However, the Hegemony unquestionably came off worse; the entirety of their remaining naval force was completely destroyed. Handfuls of surviving ships had tried to flee to the Harsa system, but were intercepted by stealth frigates and battlecruisers at the mass relay leading to the batarian homeworld. Those that did not surrender were destroyed.

With the path to Harsa laid open and with nothing left to defend the space around the planet, the leaders of the Hegemony knew that they were doomed. With their navy whipped from existence, there was nothing left the defend Khar'shan; the Alliance would be able to land troops and bomb their positions from orbit with impunity, though the humans were still abiding by Citadel Conventions and were not expected to utilize asteroids or space stations as large impact weapons. They would still not negotiate with the Alliance however; these power-mad lords were more willing to send the planets 13,000,000,000 inhabitants to their deaths than give in to a perceived inferior.

The Systems Alliance, while in a position of total control over the war and would certainly emerge victorious, looked on their planned attack on the Batarian homeworld with dread. They had just lost an enormous part of their fleet in the last space battle, and now they were faced with assaulting the Hegemony homeworld itself. On top of this, the Alliance economy was starting to buckle; seven years of constant war production was taking its toll on the human GDP, and the invasion of the planet, which would take 3 years to fully secure at the very least, would unquestionably send the human economy into a depression that would take years to recover from. And yet, what else could humanity do? Allowing the vile Hegemony to continue its power trip was unquestionable, not when they were so close to ending its reign.

Fortunately, or very unfortunately depending on the viewpoint, no invasion or subjugation of Khar'shan was necessary; the batarians took care of the Alliance's job for them.

For all the evil that the Hegemony had unleashed upon the galaxy since making contact with the Citadel, there was one good they had accomplished was to finally keep the various nations on the planet in check. For centuries, these countries had constantly fought each other for territory, slaves, land, and any other reasons that could come to mind. Only when Prothean ruins had been discovered on Bira did they unite to form the Hegemony, and by the time these nations realized that the Prothean people were gone and posed no threat to them the Hegemony had grown too powerful for them to overthrow. Now, however, the Systems Alliance had shattered that government, and the nation-states of Khar-shan could reclaim their long lost influence.

While the Alliance was rebuilding its fleets and gathering whole armies for the final push, stealth frigates in the Harsa system reported something remarkable; virtually every single country on the batarian homeworld had arrested and executed the local Hegemony authorities, and the Hegemony's equivalent to Arcturus Station had been destroyed by ground based mass drivers. In a single swoop, the uniting force of the batarian people had been destroyed. With power now back in their hands, the respective countries immediately turned on each other, centuries of bitterness and hate for crimes now barely remembered returning full force. Within hours of the coup, the first of internal fighting began as the people of Khar'shan began tearing each other apart. None had any clear objectives, simply blind rage and a sudden freedom to act upon it.

Within two days of the sudden free-for-all, the first WMDs began to fall. Nuclear and anti-matter warheads were launched by every nation participating the sudden wars of aggression, and the bombs fell like rain. The only countries not targeted were several small nations that had managed to avoid entering the tangled mess of past grievances. In time, not even these nations would survive, as they would flooded with radiation and refugees.

Khar'shan was a smoking, radioactive, smoking wasteland long before the Systems Alliance ever began an attack on the Kite's Nest cluster.

oo-00-oo

**And for those questioning why the nation-states of Khar-shan so suddenly turned on each here, remember back to the Lair of the Shadow Broker when you could try to sell WMDs to those same batarian countries in order to profit from an all out war between them. **


	18. 2218: The Aftermath-Batarians

**2218: The Aftermath- Batarians**

With the self-inflicted nuclear holocaust of their homeworld, the pride, spirit, and power of the batarian people were all completely destroyed. What was once Hegemony controlled space was now an unrecognizable wreck; virtually all of its industry was destroyed, scuttled, or captured and shipped to Alliance controlled systems to augment their own production. Their economy scarcely qualified as such anymore, the military was almost completely annihilated, and their colonies were in shambles.

The final casualty figure for the Batarian Hegemony came to 1.7 billion, not including those lost on Khar'shan or the inevitable civilian or slave deaths. All told, the total batarian population was reduced by more than 25%. However, the exact situation for the batarian population varied greatly depending on where the individual was located.

In the colonies of the Skyllian Verge, the condition of the Batarians was surprising good. Due to the swiftness of the Alliance advance during the Skyllian Blitz, the damage to the infrastructure of these planets and resource platforms was very limited. In addition, these were the worlds where the vast majority of the populations wanted to join the System's Alliance. Few were angered or shed tears when the human government announced its annexation of the entire Verge. These worlds, and especially Carmala, would help pull the Systems Alliance economy out of a severe post-war recession years before it would have recovered without them.

Those in the "West" Hegemony, though, were quite the opposite. Three years of what amounted to trench warfare, its infrastructure was nearly non-existent. However, unlike the Verge worlds, these did not enjoy the protection or assistance of the victorious humans. In fact, many of them were subject to full blockade even after the war was over, due to these being where the hard line loyalists were located. The colonial governments, those that weren't puppets the Systems Alliance had set up after they had fallen to marine forces, were presented with an ultimatum; after abolishing slavery and the caste system, and setting up a democratic government, they would be allowed to reenter Council Space as independent colony worlds. Some of these worlds suffered from instability, isolation, and civil war for decades as they waffled on accepting the demands or maintain their insane culture.

Those in the Free Batarian Coalition were not as poorly off as those in the Loyalist colonies, but were not nearly in as good a situation themselves. The majority of the population was newly freed slaves and returned POWs from the war. At first glance, this seemed a recipe for disaster. However, the majority of the former soldiers had been impressed into the military; even those who had supported the Hegemony before then had been fully turned against it by the government's throwing them to the wolves for the sake of buying time and wearing the Alliance down. The two groups were able to cooperate with limited infighting. Unfortunately, the area's infrastructure, like that of the "West" Hegemony, was thoroughly trashed by the Verge War. While the prisoners returning from Alliance prison camps were capable of repairing the damage, and instruct the newly freed slaves in the needed skills, all these efforts to help build the Coalition into any level of real economic or military power were hampered and brought to a halt by pirates and slavers from the Terminus Systems. These bandits, once happy to accept money from these same people to attack their enemies, now turned on them, and began raiding the former subjects of their main employers.

In a series of emergency meetings, the government of the FBC tried to decide what could be done about the dangerous encroachment of the criminal cartels. There seemed to be no easy way out of their predicament; with their industry and shipbuilding capabilities still broken and trying to get back on their feet, they were helpless to build the fleet and army needed to defend themselves. Nor did they have the capital necessary to try and bribe the pirates away; few could agree on the best way to tax the residents of the Coalition, and the few tithes received were barely enough to keep even the most basic government running, let alone pay off the dozens of slaver and raider groups that were tearing into the newly formed nation.

Eventually, after weeks of debate and taking polls from the population, the Free Batarian Coalition finally announced its intention. Reaching out to the Systems Alliance, to the disbelief of the galaxy, it proposed the following deal; the FBC would join with the HSA as a vassal state, paying a regular tribute of credits and raw materials to the human-dominated government, in exchange for protection from the Terminus raiders and assistance rebuilding their infrastructure.

The proposal from the new batarian nation bamboozled the entire Alliance. Whether or not they should accept the deal was debated from Parliament down to high school classrooms. On one hand, many argued that accepting the proposal would go against the Alliance's belief in a people's right to choose their own government. Additionally, many were concerned with accepting the people that they had just finished fighting a devastating war with. Others countered that the people of the Coalition were choosing to become subjects to the Alliance willingly, and were, therefore, choosing the government they wished to follow. Many also pointed out an age-old saying; that freedom was worthless when you were cold, starving, and defenseless. As for the war, many pro-acceptance citizens reminded their opponents that the batarians were not the enemy they had fought, the Batarian Hegemony was. And the Hegemony was destroyed. Those in the Free Batarian Coalition did not deserve the ire some were giving them.

Eventually, after a lengthy debate at Arcturus Station that went on for several weeks, the Systems Alliance announced its decision; they had accepted the proposal. Within a few days of the announcement, Alliance destroyers and cruisers began patrolling along the FBC's border with the Attican Traverse. A week after this, the first of many pirate raids were repelled by the new human defenders.

Ecstatic by their new reversal of fortune, the FBC began focusing on building a future and healing the scars that had been inflicted on the enslaved for millennia, knowing their client status with the humans would shield them from harm.

oo-00-oo

**As you have probably guessed, the situation of the Batarian people varies greatly based on their "geographical" location.**

**The people in the newer Verge colonies are almost all dancing for joy. Not only did they get to join the Systems Alliance, they get to do so without the Hegemony trying to kill them. Heck, they don't even have to leave their homes; all they had to do was sign a paper and change the flag. Needless to say, they are riding high. There are some that are opposed to it, certainly, and they will be a problem for the locals, but aside from that, things are pretty good. **

**As for the die-hards in the systems closest to Khar'shan, they are under occupation. It's not like the brutal military occupation that the Alliance of Renegade Reinterpretations, though; the Alliance isn't stationing whole armies to enforce a brutal police state. In fact, the human military has no land presence on the ground of any "West" Hegemony colonies it has not set up vassal states on at all. They have essentially parked a small flotilla in orbit over each planet, handed the colonial governments an ultimatum, and will only go away once the demands were met, leaving the Hegemony supporters below to rot until they swallow their pride. There isn't much else those people can do, really; the captains of the ships over these worlds have orders to fire on any attempts to build mass driver or GUARDIAN anti-air installations. **

**The Coalition, though, is arguably in the most difficult position. As its population is made up almost entirely of freed slaves and lower-tier citizens, they are used to having a strong upper class to make decisions for them. They have no idea how to run a government, a complex an economy, or a military more organized than an angry mob. So, they automatically looked around for the biggest person that they can to keep an eye on them and tell them how. This isn't an insult to those people, it is something that has been physiologically inflicted on them for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It will take time before they will be able to overcome that amount of time of constant oppression. And, in the meantime, the Alliance can provide protection while they learn the intricacies of running their own lives. With their providing the human government with resources and tribute, it is a logical and mutually beneficial relationship, with few detractors. And eventually, the government will eventually be able to stand on its own. **

**Or it could be that the Cerberus sleeper agents in the new nation's leadership are following orders directly from Jack and Eva Harper themselves, and are paving the way for the Free Batarian Coalition to be annexed into the Systems Alliance completely as part of a plan to eventually unite all species in the galaxy into a single, omni-racial central government. But really, why would ANYONE believe that THAT was the case. **


	19. Aftermath- Citadel Space

**2218: The Aftermath- Citadel Space**

There was but one reaction that was repeated across all of the Council species in regards to humanity's victory over the Batarian Hegemony; complete and utter disbelief. While few of the species in the unification of species doubted humanity would present a competent resistance to their enemy, the swiftness and devastation of the System Alliance's victory over the Hegemony was completely unexpected and the people of the civilized galaxy simply did not know what to make of it. The implications of humanity, a species that had been a part of the galactic community for only slightly over half a century, had gone up against one that had been such for six times that long and not only win, but utterly destroy their opponent, was something the peoples of the Milky Way simply did not know how to handle.

The Volus, after the shock of the ending of the Verge War, quickly went into full dismay; the post-war recession the Alliance slipped into as its losses in war material came to light quickly began dragging the Vol Protectorate down with it, as the two peoples had been heavily investing in each other's economies ever since humanity's reveal to the galaxy at large. While their economy did not descend to the same level as the Alliance's would, the shrink on the Vol Protectorate's GDP was very significant and would send shockwaves throughout the Milky Way. However, in time, the HSA's strong economic ties to the Hierarchy's client race would prove instrumental in ending the recession as various loans were called in to fuel humanities land grab in the Skyllian Verge that would fuel the recharge of the Alliance's economy. On top of this, the Protectorate dispatched numerous bankers and economists to the Free Batarian Coalition, to help the newly freed people enter and manage an economy.

The Hanar, on the other hand, were rather pleased with the results. Because of their social and economic isolation from the rest of Citadel Space, they were almost completely unaffected by the economic downturn. In the days following the Verge War, many of the aquatic species' preachers began moving to the colonies of the defeated Batarians, hoping to bring the holy word of the Enkindlers to the four-eyed race. Due to the enormous cultural upheaval they were experiencing, the batarians converted to the Hanar faith in surprisingly large numbers.

Of all the associate species, the Elcor were the most psychologically disturbed by the upset. Their extremely conservative culture and way of thinking, a byproduct of living on their homeworld where a single misstep could lead to death, left them in complete terror at how radically the situation in the galaxy had changed. The handful of the diplomatic meetings between the Courts of Dekuuna and the Alliance parliament in the years following the Verge War ended either in confusion or disaster as the Elcor diplomats simply did not know how to react to humanity anymore, although as the years passed and the Alliance's influence spread to the point where the immense distance between the two governments became inconsequential, they eventually began to smooth out these kinks.

The three Council Member races, the Salarians, Asari, and Turians, however, were on the verge of panic. With the destruction of the Hegemony, the vast increase in the size of the Systems Alliance and their vassalisation of the vast majority of the Batarian race, the humanity had gained control of an area of the galaxy half the size of the rest of Council Space. While the casualties inflicted on the Alliance military by the Verge War were substantial, and the economic downturn and pirate/slaver raids would set the human government back still further, these would only be problems in the immediate short-run; reviews of the situation conducted by the experts of all three species showed that the recession would last, at the very most, a decade; the project of a lifetime for a salarian, a difficult but very plausible task for the turians, and a veritable blink of an eye for the asari. Once this was over, the Alliance undoubtedly begin colonizing and exploiting their new territories, and eventually become an economic powerhouse to rival any of the Council Member species. More concerning was that they would be able to field and maintain a military of comparable size to their governments as well.

What the Council most feared, however, was the fact that the unofficial system of checks and balances that had arisen within the ruling body would not be able to apply to the Systems Alliance. Over the centuries, a dynamic had emerged with the Asari providing diplomatic and economic strength, the Salarians espionage and advanced technology, and the Turians provided military strength. However, the Alliance was, while not superior to the three peoples in their respective strengths, were extremely competent in all of them. Their diplomatic abilities were second only to the Asari Republics, Cerberus's coup with destroying several Shadow Broker operations without his/her being aware they had been compromised (although this coup was the result of exceptional circumstances, and would not be repeated for several decades) demonstrated abilities on par with the STG, and their military had already shown that it could give the Turians a run for their money.

After adding up all of these components, the Council was extremely concerned with the power the Alliance could potentially wield. However, the final item on the list that was giving the big cheeses of the galaxy sleepless nights was the spectacular success of the humans' stealth frigates. These vessels and their crews were widely acknowledged as the key to humanity's victory in the Verge War, and were considered the most potent weapon in the Alliance Navy's conventional arsenal. If they were not a part of considerations for a possible war between the HSA and the rest of Citadel Space would ultimately end in a complete, if extremely bloody, victory for the later. However, with no way to counter this advantage and without such ships of their own, the Unterseeboots threw the outcome of such a conflict into doubt. There was no outward sign that the Alliance was even considering going on a war of conquest and expansion, and with its current economic situation was not able to, but the consequences if such a conflict were to arise would be immense and difficult to predict, due to this unique advantage the humans possessed, and one that no one in the entire galaxy would ever believe that they would share with others.

So, the Alliance's next move came as a complete shock to absolutely everyone.

A few months after the Verge War ended, the Systems Alliance called representatives of the Asari Republics, Salarian Union, and the Turian Hierarchy to Arcturus Station. Once they had arrived, the Alliance Parliament offered their sincerest thanks for the assistance they had provided the humans during the Verge War. As thanks for their assistance, without which the Alliance would not have been able to come out as well as it did, Parliament was granting a gift to all three of the Council species' governments; the Stealth Destroyer.

Commissioned, designed, and produced in the closing days of the Verge War, the Alliance Stealth Destroyers were a planned improvement on the current _Normandy-Class _frigates. However, the war ended before more than four of these new ships could be produced. In addition, they were extremely expensive to create, costing as much as two cruisers. Simply put, it was simply not practical to build any more, and only four were fully constructed. To repay the three governments, the Alliance gifted the _SSV Downfall, Sickle Stroke, _and _Detachment _to the Republics, Hierarchy, and Union respectively, along with plans to construct their own stealth systems for any further frigates they constructed.

They kept the class-leader, the _SSV Overlord, _for themselves.

oo-00-oo

**Now, I'm sure many of you are screaming at your computer screens, "Why would the humans ever give up such an enormous advantage that no other Council Species had?" Well, the answer is simple; in this universe, to the Alliance, everything that could drive a wedge between humanity and the other races is BAD, and must be overcome or removed at all costs. And having ships that could raid their merchants, spy on their fleet movements, or drop nuclear or anti-matter warheads on their colonies and leave with impunity, and the others having no answer to such, is a pretty big wedge. **

**Also, Parliament is fully aware of the fact that the Council is starting to take precautions against the HSA; the last time that an associate species had gathered this much power was the Krogan after the Rachni War, and we all know how that turned out. If it came down to it, the Citadel would simply grind the humans and their batarian clients to dust through sheer weight of numbers and superior economic strength. So, this is basically humanity's way of saying, "Look, we know you're scared of us now, but we are NOT going to attack you all. And to prove it, here's our most potent weapon; feel free to make your own."**

**Oh, and for those of you who don't know, Operation Overlord was the codename for the Allied liberation of German occupied France during WW2. If you can't figure out the significance, why are you reading Mass Effect fanfiction? **


	20. Aftermath- Systems Alliance

**2218: The Aftermath- The Systems Alliance**

The Alliance civilians, while initially ecstatic at their unprecedented victory, were forced to sober up almost immediately. While they had triumphed over their enemy in excess of all expectations, the cost of victory was now beginning to show. After the Battle of Cres, the Alliance navy was reduced to 3 shock dreadnoughts, 5 standard dreadnoughts, 12 carriers, 28 battlecruisers, 58 cruisers, 103 destroyers, and 131 frigates, barely two thirds of its strength at the start of the Skyllian Blitz. In addition, no less than 450,000,000 Alliance soldiers perished in the fighting, many of them veterans that been in service for years or decades before the start of the Verge War.

On top of this, there was the simple financial cost of the fighting. Parliament had been preparing for war with the now defunct Hegemony for weeks before the war began in full, and had not let up for the entirety of the 7 years the fighting was on. By the time the Batarians burned their own homeworld to ash, the Alliance government was on the verge of bankruptcy, and had accumulated substantial debt to several Council banking institutions to pay for the monumental cost of war. Almost as soon as the guns fell silent, the Alliance switched its focus from total war to preventing economic collapse.

The simplest, and most obvious, solution was to begin establishing new colonies in the Skyllian Verge. Many companies were eager to establish outposts to exploit the region for resources and especially in setting up shop on Carmala and a trio of recently discovered neutron stars to mine for Element Zero. After a quick debate, Parliament agreed that this was the most logical means of proceeding, and, gathering no small amount of its remaining capital, began a massive movement to gather potential colonists on Earth, Terra Nova, Eden Prime, and even the batarian colonies in the newly annexed Verge. Soon, the first settlements, numbering no more than a few hundred of a thousand people, began to be established across the sector, using Elysium and the pre-existing batarian colonies as springboards, and began seeking out nodes of metals to mine, testing to see what crops would best be suited to the soil of the garden worlds they found, or searching for a substance or valuable life form unique to the planet. Many quickly began sending back positive results, which helped the human economy begin to stabilize.

Then, disaster struck.

Throughout its lifetime on the galactic stage, humans had been almost completely shielded from the attacks of pirates and slavers when they were within their own territory, first by turian peace-keeping fleets and then by their own military. Now, however, they were spread out over a wide area of space, and with the inclusion of the Free Batarian Coalition into the Alliance as a vassal state the Alliance navy was spread even further. It was an advantage the less scrupulous of the galaxy swiftly capitalized on.

Within weeks of the initial setup of the new Verge colonies, pirates and slavers from the Terminus poured into the Skyllian Verge, smelling easy kills. Swiftly, no less than 3/4ths of these settlements had been ransacked, some entirely depopulated and shipped to the slave markets of the Terminus. The human military was virtually helpless to stop them; for every raid the Alliance Navy could stop, two more had occurred unopposed. They simply did not have enough ships to protect such a large area with impunity.

With this massive defeat, so soon after one of the most massive victories in galactic history, panic spread throughout human space, and the slight economic stability in the immediate aftermath of the Verge War swiftly gave way to economic collapse. The Alliance's GDP shrank by 10% within a few months, and for the first time in decades, unemployment began to rise significantly. The handful of second wave colonists that went ahead with their scheduled settlements almost all met the same fate, adding fuel to the fire. Investigations into the Terminus found the reason for this sudden slave grab; the aforementioned lack of human slaves in the galaxy had lead to such individuals becoming ludicrously expensive due to the simple lack of supply, and having a human slave had become a status symbol in the Terminus and, formally, in the Batarian Hegemony. Now, the slavers had the opportunity to earn more credits than they ever thought possible, as thousands of humans were now ripe for the taking.

With little funds left and its tax incomes drastically shrinking as more and more citizens were out of work, the Alliance Parliament began to lose its head. The citizens that they governed all looked to them to solve the problems that were plaguing the HSA, but they could not proceed given the self-defeating situation they found themselves in. They could not expand the military to defend the new colonies with their funds as low as they were, but they could not get the funds they needed because they had to finance the new colonies.

After several weeks of debate, Parliament finally drafted and passed a bill that almost none of them were in favor off, regardless of their political allegiance, but were forced to recognize as necessary. Up until this point, Alliance Parliament had been the ones in charge of humanity's colonial development. No one trusted private enterprise with such an important task that could have such disastrous consequences, and with good reason. On top of this, there was no financial need at the time to pass colonization on, as the vast majority were on planets that had already been colonized, which vastly lowered the costs of the enterprise. Now, however, there was financial need.

So, in 2218, Parliament passed the Free Colonization Act. In effect, it allowed private enterprises, such as corporations, to set up colonies on worlds, without the Alliance having total control of the enterprise, although these institutions would still have to go through a bureaucracy that many proclaimed to be specifically designed to slow up the process for private institutions as much as possible. Still, almost all of the human megacorps jumped at the chance to set up their own colonies for profit, and soon they began laying down the groundwork on top of the Alliance Parliament's doomed efforts.

With the process of colonization now taking care of itself, the Systems Alliance began focusing its entire effort on rebuilding, and then further strengthening, the space and land forces of the HSA. Soon, new battlecruisers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and even 5 carriers, 2 dreadnoughts, and a shock dreadnought were under construction, and many, particularly the smaller warships, were on duty within weeks. Slowly but surely, the pirates and slavers were being pushed back as their raids declined in the face of renewed opposition, although it would be years before they were gone completely.

However, something quickly became apparent to the analysts surveying the situation. Even if the Alliance military returned to its highest levels in its history, it would not be enough to fully protect the entirety of the space it was obligated to protect. Between the core Alliance regions, the newly annexed Verge, and the Free Batarian Coalition, the human government was responsible for an area equal in area to the rest of Citadel Council Space. In order to ensure the safety of their dependents, the Alliance need a military equal, or at the very least comparable to, a Citadel Member species, and dreadnoughts in particular, in order to fight off or at the very least intimidate any who would threaten their people and their territory. However, the human leaders knew that the Council would never allow them to build any ships in excess of the strict limit the Treaty of Farixen placed on the production of such ships. However, the Alliance was determined to achieve this aim, as failure meant that their own people would suffer. Thus, Parliament began, in secret, to move to reform the Treaty to suit their current needs.

They began moving to get the Council Member governments on their side. By granting the Asari Republics, Turian Hierarchy, and Salarian Union the otherwise unusable stealth destroyers, the Alliance gained enormous political capital with each of these governments. On top of this, humanity had already developed good relations with each of the governments in question. For decades, the Alliance had been following all the Council's edicts and sowing good will wherever it could, drafting trade treaties, and generally working for the collective good of Citadel Space. Now, humanity decided it was going to ask for something in return.

In the final months of 2218, Ambassador Donnell Udina presented a request to the Council on behalf of the Human Systems Alliance. The request read that the Treaty of Farixen be amended in a manner that would allow the Alliance the same number of dreadnoughts as a Council member species, on the grounds that their territory had expanded to the point where the 5:3:1 ratio set up by the Treaty was no longer sufficient to defend the territory they were bound to control. Predictably, the three Councilors initially refused the request. However, when this occurred, the Alliance Parliament opened the floodgates. Calling in numerous favors that had been earned ever since the introduction of humanity on the galactic stage, the HSA brought the Council species governments onto their side, who proclaimed that humanity had shown, both throughout its history and recently with the granting of their stealth frigate technology, that they could be trusted with the increased number of dreadnoughts.

Left with their hands bond as, for the first time in history, the Council member government opposed their Council representative, the three individuals were forced to cave to humanity's demand. However, they were not ready to surrender all initiative to the humans. When the Council and Udina next met, they presented a counter proposal; the Council would amend the Treaty of Farixen to a new ration of 5:3:2:1, with the "2" being given to any Associate species who controlled a certain amount of space which included not on the humans, but the volus and elcor as well, on two conditions. First, that the Alliance and any other associate government allow no more than 4 dreadnoughts within two relay jumps from their borders with other council members, and allow for increase monitoring by SPECTRE agents to ensure that these peoples did not build over the new limit.

While the Alliance accepted the first condition readily enough, they fought the second at every possible turn, relinquishing their opposition only after expending considerable political capital to no avail. Finally, humanity resigned itself to the fact that, like it or not, the single institution within the Citadel that they most reviled would be keeping a closer eye on them than before, and accepted the compromise. With their ability to construct a fleet capable of defending their vast new territory finally in their hands, Parliament refocused its efforts on warship construction.

oo-00-oo

**Still glad I had the Alliance keep on attacking? Still glad I had them utterly destroy the Hegemony, and declare themselves masters of an area of space they were nowhere near ready to control? Well, I hope you are, because now thousands of colonists are being sold at slave auctions on Omega because of it. Not to mention the simple political embarrassment; the Alliance hoped that by going to war with the Hegemony, the slavers would be broken beyond recovery. Now the Hegemony is gone, and the slavers are a greater problem than ever. **

**Awhile ago, I got a review saying that my writing on the Verge War was turning the Alliance into a Mary Sue, due to their utterly trashing the Hegemony with the later possessing no real advantages or successes. My reasons for doing this weren't to simply glorify humanity at the expense of everyone else in defiance of all logic, but because I am invoking the Won The War, Lost The Peace trope. Simply put, the Human Systems Alliance has overextended themselves, and are now barely holding together. And it will take quite some time before they get out of this rut.**

**In addition to all this, many of the new colonies in the Verge are under corporate control until they can become self-sustaining, opening up even more opportunities for crimes in the name of profits. Needless to say, Parliament will be keeping a close eye on the corporations, but there could be things they could miss…**

**And suddenly, humanity becomes extremely manipulative and devious in the world of galactic politics. From what I can tell, the Citadel Council has power because what they say is what their governments believe. And as those three governments are some of the oldest and most powerful governments in the Milky Way, they have a significant political clot whenever they coincide with their respective governments policies. And that is a big chunk of the reason why the Alliance gave out the plans for stealth frigates; yes, they were thanking them for their contributions to their war effort, but they were also getting them on their side for when they dropped their big bombshell. **

**And they did get what they want, but they have to put up with more SPECTREs breathing down their necks. I'll get into Paragon Humanity's relationship with them later…**

**But, at the end of the day, the people of the Alliance, ever optimistic, believe that the worst is over, and that they will return to the age of peace that they have known for almost a century. **


	21. Top Secret: Eyes Only

_To: Jack and Eve Harper_

_CC:Fleet Admiral [name redacted], [title redacted, name redacted], Fleet Admiral [name redacted], Matriarch [name redacted]_

_From: General Oleg Petrosky_

_Subject: Batarian Science Station/ "Leviathan" _

_Mr. and Mrs. Harper,_

_When the so called "Leviathan of Dis" disappeared from Jartar after a "visit" from a Hegemony dreadnought several decades ago, the two of you have made finding the Leviathan and determining its exact nature one of Cerberus's top priorities. We now no longer need to concern ourselves with the first objective; the Special Operations Teams attached to the Cerberus fleet cooperating with the Alliance flotillas securing the Harsa system uncovered a previously unknown moon orbiting the gas-giant Verush. Upon further investigation, we discovered that the Hegemony had completely erased all evidence of the moon's existence ever since the Batarians became a space-faring race, and the bases that miserable, bastardized abomination masquerading as a government built on its surface have born witness to experiments that are brutal and immoral even by the standards of a society that incorporates slavery._

_One of these, obviously, played host to the Leviathan. _

_Currently, we do not have much data on the "vessel" itself; the batarian data banks are proving difficult to crack, even with our best hacking VIs working around the clock, so we only have a few details to work off of. However, there are a handful of facts that we can relay. _

_While the Leviathan was initially believed to be an entirely organic vessel, this is, in fact, not true. From what we have found, the vessels are constructed from a blend of organic and synthetic material. Currently, there is no word on how this material constructed, or what was used in its construction. Further testing is required. _

_Every piece of the vessel itself, regardless of whether it has been removed or detached from the hull or superstructure, emits some sort of energy field around it. This field cannot be detected by any of our sensor equipment, but all of our personnel that were in close contact with relics could "feel" its presence. After this was reported, the vessel and any artifacts were immediately quarantined, as were the personnel who were exposed to it. The quarantined operatives showed signs of, barely detectable, changes in brain patterns. These alterations were very minor and disappeared after a single day in quarantine, but they remain under quarantine while further research to be done on the matter. Further relevant psychological data has been attached to this message. _

_The vessel shows extensive signs of having been equipped with artificial intelligence. So much so, it is possible that this vessel was constructed by and for a society of synthetics, or even that the SHIP ITSELF was sentient. Again, the relevant files, containing the little information we have uncovered up until this point, are attached to this missive._

_There is one point that needs to be mentioned, and it is one that has deep implications. The so called Leviathan, by all accounts, is non-functional. It will never move under its own power again; it is simply too badly damaged and has been without maintenance for too long. However, in spite of this, the Leviathan vessel still has power, and several artifacts and parts of the ship itself are still intact, including one of its main guns. Given all this information, the scientists assigned to this project believe it is quite probable that other vessels like this one are still in hear-unto unknown corners of the galaxy. Given the possible threat they may pose to the Alliance, and to the Galaxy at large, I strongly advise that Cerberus devote the majority of its assets searching out more of these vessels, researching them, and preparing the Alliance and our allies in case that we find any that are still functional. _

_General Oleg Petrosky, Commander of Cerberus Forces in the Harsa System. _


End file.
